bug related to ical

Robert Horn rjhorn at alum.mit.edu
Mon Jun 25 10:47:59 PDT 2012


I've noticed a problem related to handling of ical attachments.  I'm
using Notmuch 0.13 on Emacs 23.3.1.  I've done some basic
troubleshooting.

The problem arises with emails from Concur that include an ical
attachment being viewed with the notmuch message viewer.  The problems
are:
 1. When opening the email there is sometimes the following mesage and
 error in Emacs message buffer:
  Converting icalendar...done
  notmuch-show-insert-bodypart-internal: Wrong type argument: stringp, nil

 2. Some (not all) of the view commands fail, e.g. "v", "V", "w".
 Others work, like "m", and "q".

 3. Examination of the /tmp directory shows notmuch-ical temp files being
 created but they are zero length.

This is related to the ical attachment.  When I editted one of the emails to
remove the attachment, the problem went away.  I suspect it is related
to the attachments being base64 encoded.  The header of the mime
attachment shows:

Content-Type: application/octet-stream;
	name="ConcurCalendarEntry.ics"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment;
	filename="ConcurCalendarEntry.ics"

The encoding is correct.  The attachment decodes and looks right.  With
some details obscured the attachment contains:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:properly-formatted
DTEND:properly-formatted
DTSTAMP:properly-formatted
LOCATION:
SUMMARY:Concur Travel Itinerary
DESCRIPTION:Lots of stuff
 with about 80 lines of description. All indented properly.
UID:properly-formatted
PRIORITY:3
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

I can live without the ics files, so fixing this is not a priority for
me.  If there is someone interested in figuring this out, I've saved an
email and can answer questions.  I got lost trying to follow the lisp
code paths for attachments, so I'm not sure whether it's the text or the
base64 that is being handed off to icalendar.

R Horn
rjhorn at alum.mit.edu


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