2000-01-05-14:54:48 Charles Curley:
> Is this anything I need to worry about?
Nope. Delete the message and ignore it. If you can see it, it's probably
already not doing any good.
The tale behind this message is kind of ugly.
First, the designer of the imap protocol decided to define the protocol so
that it required the server to maintain a collection of cookies, which didn't
have any natural place to go in the mbox folder format.
Then when he wrote the daemon to offer imap services (or, more precisely, the
"c-client" library that imapd, pop3d, and pine all use for accessing the
mailbox) he decided to store his extra goo in your mailbox, and give the
message a special subject which c-client refrains from ever showing to users.
> [...] using Fetchmail and IMAP to fetch mail from the ISP.
If your mailbox was only accessed by (a) the ISP's local delivery agent (e.g.
procmail) appending to it, and (b) c-client code like imapd reading from it
and re-writing it, then you would never see that message. The message shows up
when something else accesses the folder. If the special secret hidden message
is no longer at the beginning of the folder, it becomes visible even through
c-client.
-Bennett
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