After a long debugging session while scripting my webmail, I believe I have traced the problem to the way httplib sends POST requests.
I have compared tcpdump listings from Python 2.4.3 and 2.5.0's httplib (via urllib/urllib2), Perl's LWP::UserAgent 2.033 and Firefox 2.0. Only Python sends the request in such a way that the mailserver closes the connection before I get any data from the POST request (immediate FIN packet after the POST request). httplib always sends the urlencoded POST data in a separate packet from the HTTP headers, and this seems to cause problems with the web interface in Ipswitch-IMail/8.05 (the software running on Doteasy's webmail). Firefox 2.0 has most of the headers in a single packet, but unlike httplib, it always places a couple of headers in the continuation packet as well (usually the content-length and content-type headers). LWP::UserAgent 2.033 doesn't use continuation at all, and sends everything in a single packet. Is this a bug in httplib or the web server? Is there a workaround, or should I use Perl for this? -- Haakon -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
