Incorrect padding

[ael]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 07:22:22PM +0100, Nicolas Sebrecht wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 10:57:40AM +0100, Lele Gaifax wrote:
> 
> > FWIW, I reported what seems the same error one year ago, with subject
> > "binascii.Error: Incorrect padding" (unfortunately I'm not able to reference
> > the thread as gmane interface isn't helping).
> > 
> > In my case, the reason was that the AUTHENTICATE command resulted in a plain
> > string containing "go ahead".
> > 
> > See also https://sourceforge.net/p/imaplib2/bugs/11/
> 

Yes. I just used the cyrus imtest program to see what is happening, and
indeed this is exactly the problem:

SSL_connect:SSLv3/TLS write client hello

This is mail.btinternet.com which is the imap server for one of the
largest ISP's in the UK, but notorious for incompetence. It seems to be
impossible to penetrate the layers of dead wood and walls of stupefying
ignorance which is their customer "service", so I can't see much hope of
it being fixed.

So I do suggest that where an illegal response arrives,
imaplib/offlineimap should print out the offending string with a
complaint and then ignore it rather than throwing an exception.

Great work by Lele in tracking this down.

ael