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Known bugs in SqWebMail

• This is really not an SqWebMail bug. The UNIX version of Netscape Communicator reliably crashes when you edit a lot of text in a TEXTAREA input for some time. First, it attempts to allocate about 40 megabytes of RAM, then crashes soon thereafter. This is not my problem. Hit 'PREVIEW' periodically, to save your unsent work. If Communicator crashes, you can recover most of your text from the Drafts folder.
  
  
• Another Communicator bug. When uploading an attachment, Communicator will hang if you select a directory instead of a file.
  
  

• In practice, SqWebMail is somewhat tolerant of the mailbox contents being changed in a middle of a session by another mail client, accessing the same account. Still, all bets are off, and be aware of potential consequences (such as clicking on one message, and the message coming up blank, or another message appearing).

• A lot of disk space is temporarily required when a message is sent, or a new attachment is uploaded. When a message is sent, first the message is saved as a draft, in the Drafts folder. Then, the draft is rewritten to the Sent folder, and the copy in Drafts is deleted. Which means that if disk quotas are used, low quotas will make it somewhat difficult to send messages with large attachments. It gets even worse when files are uploaded as attachments. Say you already have a message with attachments, totalling 500KBs. You are about to upload another 200KB file. First, your HTTP POST is saved in a temporary file - 200KB+change. Then, the uploaded file is extracted into another temporary file - 200KB. Then, a new version of your message is created, with the new attachment encoded using base64 - 500KB+264KB. Total additional disk space required to handle a 200KB attachment: 200KB+200KB+764KB. If you're using filesystem-based quotas, everything gets counted against your quota. It's not as bad if you're using the deliverquota maildir agent, which will ignore most of the baggage.

• And from the "it's not a bug but a feature" department. New caching and handling algorythm effective with version 0.11. The Trash folder is introduced. Instead of deleted messages now hanging around in their original folder before being purged (but displayed separately), deleted messages will now migrate to the Trash folder, before being purged later. When you select a message to be deleted, it will show up marked with the status of D in its original folder, if you go back to the folder contents page. When you leave the folder, it will now be moved to the Trash folder.

  What really happens is that when you delete a message, SqWebMail will create a hard link into the Trash folder, then mark the message as deleted in the original folder. When you leave the folder, SqWebMail will go through the folder and unlink all deleted messages.

  Moving a message to another folder works exactly the same, except that the message is linked into that folder, instead of Trash.

  If you move a message to another folder, and you immediately go back to the folder contents window (or you move a message directly from the folder contents window), the message will show up as deleted. If you try to move a message again into another folder, this operation will quietly fail without giving you an error message.
  
  

• Because messages are displayed as a part of an HTML page (as a table cell, actually), styles and BODY attributes of HTML messages are lost. BGCOLOR should really become BGCOLOR of the table cell; similarly LINK, ALINK, VLINK should be implemented as a style, as well as any STYLE attributes from the BODY tag.
  
  
• Netscape Communicator does not yet support all HTML 4.0 attributes. Once you move or delete a message from a mailbox, it's marked as a 'D', and you can't do anything with it. If you want to move the message again, go to the folder where you moved it to. In the folder contents page, messages marked with a D get a DISABLED attribute for their checkmark. Communicator does not support the disabled tag, so if you try to move or delete the message again, it'll be a no-op.