[Haskell-cafe] Stack space overflow in HaskellNet

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Manfred Lotz <manfred.lotz at arcor.de>,
...
> I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean. Stack overflow comes
> from this:
>         forM_ msgs (\x -> fetch con x >>= print)
>
> If I change it to:
>         mapM_  (\x -> fetch con x >>= print) msgs
>
> there is the same stack overflow.

I didn't understand that myself, but neither do I know what might
be wrong.  One thing to consider is that email messages can be very
large.  Looking at messages received in the last 10 days I see I
have one that exceeds your reported stack size, and that isn't
counting the extra space required for text representation of non
printing characters etc.  There may be messages that you simply
can't "print".

The HaskellNet IMAP "fetch" is actually FETCH ... BODY[], i.e.,
the whole contents of the message.  Normal practice for giant data
files is to send them as part of a MIME multipart/mixed message,
and something like the above can proceed with a reasonable chance
of success if it avoids these attachments by fetching BODY[1]
(or BODY[1.1], etc. depending on actual structure.)  I just fetched
the 10Mb message I mentioned above to check the structure, and it
happened in the blink of an eye - BODY[1] is smaller than the header.

I don't see any support for fetch by part, you might have to hack
that up yourself.  You may ideally also want to fetch BODYSTRUCTURE,
but practically I might go out on a limb and predict that you won't
run into messages where the first part is a multipart/mixed with a
large attachment - so if the object is just a survivable first part,
you could live without BODYSTRUCTURE analysis and optimistically
ask for BODY[1].

Moving on to practical use of email via IMAP, you'd also want to
be able to fetch and decode the attachments.  At this point, it's
interesting to return to the question of space requirements.

	Donn