If you have a message with an attachment of a message/rfc822 encoded email, and the email is encoded in base64, the message does not display correctly in Evolution.

Attached are two emails:

- outer-regular.eml: This email has the inner (attached) email encoded as 8bit ASCII.

- outer-base64.eml: This email has the inner (attached) email encoded as base64.

Corresponding to each is a screenshot showing the result of each email in Evolution when trying to import them, but the same happens if the message is received via regular means (POP, IMAP...).

The regular (8bit) encoded attached email renders completely correctly.

The base64-encoded attached email renders incorrectly, seeming to stop parsing at the From header.  Looking at the message source the problem is much worse -- Evolution shows a partial decode of the base64 block (with the headers still in tact showing it as base64-encoded), and always stopping after it hits the From header.  This appears to happen regardless of where the header is.

These messages were hand-crafted, but it should be noted that Django's email system generates messages like this, and encodes attached messages in base64 all the time.  I didn't include Django's emails though because they contain confidential information, so I've generated two similar emails by hand with the same headers that Django would put in for the attachment.

Evolution also appears to munge the "Save as mbox" function for messages received like this.  But using netcat to interact with my POP3 server shows the message just fine.


Looking around there seems to be one other reference to the problem, however the author simply worked around the problem instead of reporting the bug.

http://ruby-msg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FIXES

These messages appear to work fine in Apple's Mail.app, but they also seem to have problems in Icedove/Thunderbird (but exhibit slightly different responses).