Re: Help Reading from a POP3 Mail Server

On 07 Dec 2018, at 09:44, Sam Hobbs <Sam@SimpleSamples.info> wrote: > Tim Streater wrote: >> You need to rtrim() each input line, and stop when you find a line >> consisting of just a full-stop (.) > > I think that RFC 1939 (Post Office Protocol - Version 3) and RFC 5322 > (Internet Message Format) are the relevant standards. > > RFC 5322 does show examples of commands being sent to the server and the > responses sent from the server to the client and I do see lines with > just a period but I don't see documentation of what lines like that mean. The server will send out such a line when it has finished responding to a command which will generate many lines of response, such as UIDL or RETR. After the last real response line, comes the line just consisting of a . followed by a newline. That should be CR/LF but IME mail servers lie a lot. If a command has a line-line reply, then it won't send out the dot-line. The programmer has to know which commands return one line, and which don't There's also the complication of dot-stuffing, since nothing prevents a real data line consisting of a . and nothing else. That is handled by prepending such a dot with another one (or maybe it's any line starting with a dot, can't remember). I found that somewhere in the RFCs. I do this: function networkRead ($fp, $where, &$line)    {    // Reads a line from the network and does dot-unstuffing.    $result = netRead ($fp, $line, $errno, $errstr, $where);    if ($result==false)      {      $msg = 'error in networkRead at ' . $where . ': ' . $errno . ' ' . $errstr;      writeLog ($msg);      return READ_ERROR;      }    if ($line=='.') return READ_EOM;    if (strlen($line)>1 && $line[0]=='.') $line = substr ($line, 1);    return READ_OK;    } where netRead (...) uses gets() to read a line and check for errors including timeout. -- Cheers -- Tim