Alpine: empty or malformed message
 

Using Alpine 2.02 on slackware-14.0 (32bit)

Recently it seems that almost every email is an "Empty or malformed message". When I "Use "H" to see raw text" I do see the headers but the body is still malformed and I cannot read the email.

This happens mostly with emails send by companies (webshops, car dealers, electricity company, ...) while private mail is ok.

Until recently I could see the html with "H" but something has changed on the senders side... Any idea on how to read these mails (short from switching to <your_pref_mail_client/>)?

Alpine is a MUA. AFAIK RFC-compliant MUAs don't strip headers and I've never noticed that behaviour using Alpine 2.03.
I would look at (recent) MTA / LDA / related (procmail, formail, etc, etc) (re-)configuration / debugging first.

Alpine 2.03 is scheduled for the next slackware release, I'll give it a try.
(I have no idea what MUA, RFC, MTA and LDA mean...)

No, what I was trying to is is that as long as I have used (al)pine I never encountered such anomalous behaviour. TLAs respectively are for Three Letter Acronym, Mail User Agent (as in Alpine, mutt, etc, etc), Request For Comments (Open Standards basically), Mail Transport Agent (as in Sendmail, Postfix, Exim, etc, etc) and Local Deliver Agent (commonly: procmail).

Hi cmk77,

Do you have the possibility to set up another MUA (mail user agent) like claws-mail, thunderbird or mutt?
Can you read your mail there properly? If so, something in the configuration of alpine is probably the source of your problem.

Hope this can point you in the right direction

Greetings

Marcel

I can use the webapp of my internet service provider (a microsoft thing) to read the mail, so I'm not destitute.

The (al)pine behaviour is highly anomalous:
- pressing "H" shows the headers only and nothing else
- pressing "H" twice gives "INBOX CLOSED DUE TO ACCESS ERROR" and marks the email as "D" (deleted)
- however, when pine is restarted the deleted email is still there!?

(note that I didn't change anything in the configuration)

Well, I just downloaded the "alpine-2.03-i486-1.txz" from current, assumed that it wouldn't have any dependencies and did an upgradepkg.
Guess what - problems solved! (without even editing the config file...)