[GERONIMO-5326] Geronimo javamail does not work on non-ASCII platforms

• Type: Bug
• Status: Resolved
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Fixed
• Component/s: mail
• Security Level: public (Regular issues)
• Labels: EBCDIC geronimo javamail mail z/OS

Environment

z/OS

• Assignee: Richard McGuire
• Reporter: Robin Fernandes
• Created: 19/May/10 15:18
• Updated: 19/May/10 18:03
• Resolved: 19/May/10 18:03

Description

RFC-1939 states that in the POP3 protocol, "Keywords and arguments consist of printable ASCII characters."

Geronimo javamail creates a PrintWriter to send messages down the line, but does not specify a Charset. Therefore, Strings written to the PrintWriter will be converted to bytes using the platform default encoding. On a non-ASCII platform, such as z/OS (which is an EBCDIC platform), this means non-ASCII data will be sent down the line. Consequently, the POP3 protocol is violated and the mail server will not understand the messages.

In my context, this manifests as a javax.mail.AuthenticationFailedException, presumably because the server fails to understand the login commands.

The patch below at least gets past the auth step. However, I suspect there will be further charset problems relating to decoding MIME etc... Essentially, a potential problem exists wherever the library uses new String(bytes[]), String.getBytes(), InputStreamReaders, OuputStreamWriters or any other entity that performs byte[]<->String conversions without explicitly specifying which Charset to use.

In some environments, a workaround may be to force the default encoding to ASCII by setting system property file.encoding to an ASCII codepage (e.g. -Dfile.encoding=ISO8859-1), but this is not satisfactory if other libraries in the same runtime expect the default encoding to be EBCDIC.

 
Index: POP3Connection.java
===================================================================
--- POP3Connection.java	(revision 946178)
+++ POP3Connection.java	(working copy)
@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@
 import java.net.Socket;
 import java.net.SocketException;
 import java.net.UnknownHostException;
+import java.nio.charset.Charset;
 import java.security.MessageDigest;
 import java.security.NoSuchAlgorithmException;
 import java.util.ArrayList;
@@ -156,8 +157,9 @@
         
         // The POp3 protocol is inherently a string-based protocol, so we get 
         // string readers/writers for the connection streams 
-        reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream));
-        writer = new PrintWriter(new BufferedOutputStream(outputStream));
+        Charset iso88591 = Charset.forName("ISO8859-1");
+        reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(inputStream, iso88591));
+        writer = new PrintWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(new BufferedOutputStream(outputStream), iso88591));
     }
     
     protected void getWelcome() throws IOException {