K9 crashes when trying to open spam email on galaxy s7

[Eric Katz]

Relatively recent problem. When I try to open most spam emails in k9 on my galaxy s7, k9 crashes. K9 works properly on my galaxy s5. The native email app on the s7 also works ok. Only problem is k9 on s7 phone with spam emails. Problem started a few months ago. Running latest version of k9. Same settings on s7 as on s5 phone. Anyone know what's going on. I'm sure i'm not the only one with this problem.

[George Scott Hollingsworth]

That happens to me on occasion with some spam. It happens all the time with emails from discover.com. They format their multipart boundary string with either dash or equal. I can forward it to myself and it doesn't crash k-9. I have examined the source of the discover email.

[Eric Katz]

Thanks. In my case I can't fwd to myself. Apparently the server spam filter blocks its although the original sender manages to get it thru.

In any event, email composition content should not crash an email app. Crappy coding. Any suggestions for a good, reliable email app that works?

On Tue, Jan 7, 2020, 12:26 PM George Scott Hollingsworth <gsholli...@gmail.com wrote:

That happens to me on occasion with some spam. It happens all the time with emails from discover.com. They format their multipart boundary string with either dash or equal. I can forward it to myself and it doesn't crash k-9. I have examined the source of the discover email.

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[Gunter Königsmann]

One GCC dev told me once that no app should ever crash no matter what is the input. ...and while most crashes are harmless zero-pointer dereferences some crashes are exploitable => if there is any chance you can send the devs the mail that caused the crash, perhaps after saving it as .eml an compressing it into a .zip file the devs will most probably be grateful: Most crashes are easy to fix once a dev can reproduce them because the debugger will most probably be able to tell which line the crash was caused by.

Unfortunately, as Schneier says security is a moving goal: every day bugs are fixed and every day weird contents is created that triggers bugs and even simple things that used be near-plain text (like mails and websites) get more complicated every day which means each app will be "crappy" regarding to your definition from time to time. The cause for the crash might even lie completely outside if the app in a library the phone happens to provide. In this time it cannot be found in k9's code nor using any different phone than a S9. I am not a k9 dev. But with wxMaxima, the program I support I have learnt to dread this kind of bug.

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Diese Nachricht wurde von meinem Android-Gerät mit K-9 Mail gesendet.

[Eric Katz]

Uninstalled the app from my S7 (which was the latest update version) and reinstalled the previous version from backup (same version on my s5). This fixed the problem. I use ES File explorer to back up all my apps, especially before updating an app. More often than might be expected, the updated version kills the app. In this case, reverting to previous version resolved the problem.