Text based alpine inserting whitespace when I forward a message to myself

[Howie]

Hi all,

I have a strange issue. I've been using the text email reader alpine
for a long time and
I've never seen this problem before. There is one message (it's a
TODO list) which I keep
updating and forwarding to myself. For some reason, on this one
systems I just started using,
it inserts a whitespace at the front of all the text each time I
forward it. It's not very noticable
at first, but after 3 or 4 forwards, you can't miss it and I have to
manually delete those spaces
at the front of every line. Does anybody know what's causing this and
how I can turn this off?

Best regards, Howard

[cha...@washington.edu]

On Sep 22, 12:12 pm, Howie <hcohl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have a strange issue.  I've been using the text email reader alpine
> for a long time and
> I've never seen this problem before.  There is one message (it's a
> TODO list) which I keep
> updating and forwarding to myself.  For some reason, on this one
> systems I just started using,
> it inserts a whitespace at the front of all the text  each time I
> forward it.

Dear Howard,

Can you create (and post) a message that shows the problem? I can
not reproduce your problem. If you could please a message
and post it completely (headers and body), it will help us to
reproduce your problem. Are you using an external editor at all?

Thank you.

--
Eduardo
http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/

[Howie]

I am using vim as an external editor when I edit the forward or
composed message,
but alpine is producing the file which I am editing, so it can't be an
issue with vim.

In order to generate these emails as a test, I am learning more about
the problem.

Here is my signature file, which I obtained by hitting "s" for setup
and then "s" for signature

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
John T. Alpine, Ph.D.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Notice that there are two spaces in front of the John.

Now I compose a message like such:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
John T. Alpine, Ph.D.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

There are still two spaces in front of the John.
Notice that there is one space in front of the X's.
In the third line of X's I have removed the single
space in front of the X's to show the behavior
of the problem.

Then I send the message. If I go to the Sent
folder and view the sent message it looks like this.

Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:05:00 -0400
From: Howard Cohl <hc...@nist.gov>
To: "Cohl, Howard" <howar...@nist.gov>
Subject: TEST MESSAGE


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
John T. Alpine, Ph.D.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

That was the message that I find saved in my Sent folder.
Notice it has an extra space in front of the X's and also
an extra space in front of the John. However, there are no
extra spaces in front of the rows with no space in front, i.e.
those with

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

and

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Do you see the behavior now? This gets replicated
every time I send a message, so the white spaces keep
adding on and eventually, there is a ton of white spaces.

The problem must be occuring when I do the send, because
you can already notice the problem in the message which is
saved in the "Sent" folder. In fact, now tht I test it more, it seems
to occur when I compose and send a new message to myself,
when I forward a message to myself, and when I reply a message
to myself.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Best regards, Howard

[cha...@washington.edu]

On Sep 23, 8:12 am, Howie <hcohl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you see the behavior now?  This gets replicated
> every time I send a message, so the white spaces keep
> adding on and eventually, there is a ton of white spaces.

Dear Howard,

Thank you for your explanation. I see the problem now, and I was
able to reproduce it. I think I know where the bug is, and I will just
need to check it tonight.

I am very surprised nobody caught this before, but I am glad you
did. Thank you. I will get back with news later tonight.

--
Eduardo
http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/

[cha...@washington.edu]

On Sep 23, 11:55 am, cha...@washington.edu wrote:

>   Thank you for your explanation. I see the problem now, and I was
> able to reproduce it. I think I know where the bug is, and I will just
> need to check it tonight.
>

For completeness of this thread, we solved this problem bu disabling
flowed text in Alpine, by enabling

[X] Do Not Send Flowed Text

In this case Alpine will not stuff initial spaces. The problem I had
that allowed me to reproduce the problem was caused by the fact that
some MTA rewrote the Content-Type header by deleting the
"format=flowed" parameter, so the problem was not Alpine but some
external agent.

--
Eduardo
http://patches.freeiz.com/alpine/