Balsa chokes on a piece of spam

worker201 · Post by **worker201** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 12:34 pm

Well, balsa has been a darn good email client for most of my Linux history. But today, it coughed up a hairball. It crashes upon loading. Here's what it tells me when I launch it from command-line:

Code: Select all

$ balsa
opening Inbox..
done, msgcnt=0
Unhandled property: 318 word-wrap
Unhandled property: 320 -khtml-nbsp-mode
Unhandled property: 322 -khtml-line-break
Unhandled property: 41 font
Unhandled property: 41 font
Unhandled property: 12 border-collapse
Unhandled property: 51 letter-spacing

HtmlCss-ERROR **: file cssmatcher.c: line 1317 (css_matcher_apply_rule): should not be reached
aborting...

So apparently there is an evil message in my inbox. I was able to see my inbox on screen just long enough to figure out what message was first in the queue. Then, I went to /var/spool/mail, and dug this out:
http://www.triple-bypass.net/download/badmail.txt

(my address has been replaced, for security purposes)

So, can anyone tell me how to get rid of this message and move on? There is still mail in my inbox which I would like to read. I tried to go around it with pine, and see if it would behave, but the messages had already been downloaded from the server, I guess, since pine's inbox was empty.

worker201 · Post by **worker201** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 2:32 pm

Bad news - my sysadmin told me it was okay to go in and delete the offending messages from my /var/mail/spool/lholcombe file. Which I did. I saw that the messages were no longer in my inbox, but Balsa crashed immediately with the same problems.

Strange, nothing has changed since yesterday. Maybe it was one of the other messages.

worker201 · Post by **worker201** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 2:38 pm

Okay, I guess it was one of the other messages. I installed pine and used that to view and delete the messages. Since pine doesn't parse anything but text. Balsa now works fine.

This is very strange, though. If someone's mail can crash my email client, then something is very wrong.

Void Main · Post by **Void Main** » Thu Jan 19, 2006 3:13 pm

You could have made a backup copy of your /var/spool/mail/username and then just edited it in vim to delete the message you didn't want. I often manually edit my inbox. Don't know what caused your mail client to crash. You might want to report it to the developers.