On Thu, 08 Mar 2012 15:30:21 -0500, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote: > This does seem to be a regression in gmime 2.6. I've reported the bug > upstream, along with a simplified (non-notmuch) demonstration: > > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=671680 > > We'll see what gmime's upstream has to say about it. Thanks so much for following up on this, Daniel. > As a devil's advocate, i could argue that a message in a maildir that > starts with a "From " line isn't a proper e-mail message in the first > place, and therefore gmime 2.6 is being more rigorously correct about > what it accepts. In particular, if a user were to place a multi-message > mbox file in their notmuch message store, i think that notmuch linked > against 2.4 would happily index only the first message of it, and the > rest of the message would be "hidden", whereas gmime 2.6 allows us to > detect these failures and avoid indexing them directly. I actually agree with this position. mbox files are not proper email messages, so if gmime does not explicitly support parsing them then we really can't expect it to parse them. We *can* expect gmime to return some sort of proper error message/return code/etc and not fail in a bad way, but beyond that I think the burden is on us. > That said, i understand that this is probably not an entirely rare > situation, and i lean toward the idea that gmime 2.4's behavior was > actually the Right Thing. Also, I haven't been able to find any > explicit documentation to indicate that the behavior change was > a deliberate one. And I think I don't agree with this one: I not think that handling mbox files in the way you've outlined above is the Right Thing. Only partially parsing an mbox file, by indexing only the first message for instance, seems like a bad solution to me, and one that's likely to lead to a lot of confusion (e.g. "where are the rest of the messages that were in my mbox?"). If notmuch encounters an mbox file in the store it should just skip the message and continue, while indicating that it is skipping the message because it's not a proper email message, as it does with other non-email files. jamie.