[Alpine-info] Crash on calendar invite; ical_parse_generic_comp() NULL pointer

[Eduardo Chappa via Alpine-info]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2025, Mark Hills via Alpine-info wrote:


> In general, calendar invitation emails are working though I rarely receive

> them.

>

> In this case I have one that crashes Alpine.


Dear Mark,

   thank you for sharing a sample message that shows the problem. The issue 
is that the invitation was not encoded properly. Since calendar 
invitations are of text/ type (text/calendar) they must be encoded 
according to RFC 2045, which states that base64 text/ must be transformed 
from \n line endings to \r\n line endings before conversion. Here is the
relevant text from rfc 2045:

    Care must be taken to use the proper octets for line breaks if base64
    encoding is applied directly to text material that has not been
    converted to canonical form.  In particular, text line breaks must be
    converted into CRLF sequences prior to base64 encoding.  The
    important thing to note is that this may be done directly by the
    encoder rather than in a prior canonicalization step in some
    implementations.

What I did is to add a check function that detects this problem and fixes 
it so that the internal Alpine routines do not choke on bad data. The fix 
is already uploaded to the git repository.

Thank you so much for reporting this problem and being part of finding the 
solution.

-- 
Eduardo