Mboxutil -l Does Not Display Correctly Special Character Encoded Folder Names (Doc ID 2091736.1)

Last updated on APRIL 05, 2022

Applies to:

Symptoms

Goal: To write a script to restore messages from filesystem backup (ZFS snapshot).

It must be able to handle all valid folder names, including special characters (Unicode encoding).

Current behavior encountered:
Output from mboxutil -l is not displaying as expected for special characters, for example, letters with umlaut.

1. Create a folder with an umlaut in the name - from a Mac OS X mail client.

Here is the mboxutil -l output, with -x, to show the encoded path name for the folder:

It looks like the folder name is simply "test with Umlaut" and that being a normal capital 'U'.

e.g. user/<UID>/test with Umlaut

and not

user/<UID>/test with Ümlaut

But looking at the encoded folder name, it is clearly more than just a capitalized U.

Here is the IMAP LIST response:

* LIST (\HasNoChildren) "/" "test with U&Awg-mlaut"

Here is mboxutil -l | od showing it is a multibyte character:

$ mboxutil -lp 'user/<UID>/test with U*' | head -3 | tail -1 | od -c
0000000 5 7 4 4 2
0000020 0 1 5 / 1 2 / 1 7 0 9 : 5 9
0000040 m s h o s t
0000060 - u s e r / <UID>
0000100 c / t e s t w i t h U 032 m l
0000120 a u t \n

(see "U 032 m" not "U m")

The problem is that mboxutil -l seems to be displaying a normal U, but pipe to the od command shows that is not what is happening.

Changes

mailhost:/gcs/app/mail/imsadmin$ echo $TERM
xterm
mailhost:/gcs/app/mail/imsadmin$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 

Cause

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