[Evolution] Bug#690741: evolution corrupts any mboxes with "From_" lines

[Christoph Anton Mitterer]

Package: evolution
Severity: critical
Tags: upstream
Justification: causes serious data loss


Hi.

This is rather a warning for all Debian users. the bug is already reported upstream.

Today I found a critical bug in Evolution that corrupts any mails when using
the mbox format (either by exporting them, or the mbox account format, or in earlier
versions of Evolution, where mbox was the default mail format for ALL mail).

Over many years, not noted by anyone, it generally corrupted any mails that contained
“From_” lines, that means lines that match the regexp “^>+From .*$”.
In other words, lines with start with 0 to many “>” characters followed by “From ”
(note the space character after it) followed by any further characters.

As far as I can see, there is no way to reconstruct the mails correctly.


Now people usually know me as a quite polite person, but giving that I sit now on roughly
60 GB of corrupted mail, one will hopefully understand my rude and offensive tone in
the upstream bug report.
I no way I target my heavy criticism to the Debian maintainers.


Cheers,
Chris.