from "Ron Clarke" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
From time to time, I, too, get an aborted POP3 download. And the
abort repeats at the same message number at every further download
attempt.
My solution ? I fire up Windows 3.1 and Netscape, clear the server
mailbox, trash the duplicates and, if I'm really pixxed off, send a
message to the sender of the offending email.
Seems that there is an occasional choke with DOS email (Barebones
can't cope with these, either) that the Windows email clients have no
problem with.
It could be the sender's email client. It could be the ISP server
software adding the odd character here or there. Doesn't matter.
If Win 3.1 clients can cope, the so should DOS clients.
I think we need to solve this one, once and for all.
Can anyone deal ?
(end of quote)
What particular offending characteristics did the email messages in question
possess? Sending a message to the sender of the offending email is not good
enough if you don't know just what snagged. Just knowing the patient is ill is
not good enough, we need to know what particular disease.
I remember when Ultimail Lite, in OS/2 Warp 4, kept downloading the same 18
messages every 15 minutes with no sign of a crash. I thought for a time there
was an error at the server end. This happened in April 1998. Then I tried the
OS/2 port of popclient and downloaded 79 messages, and never ran Ultimail Lite
again. Good riddance, I hated the Ultimail Lite interface with all those
cryptic file names that included upper-ASCII characters, and two or three files
for each message.
Then there were a few times popclient for OS/2 crashed with a segment violation,
due to one or more lines in the message having 1024 characters. Popclient would
download up to and including the message that snagged, while the message that
snagged would remain on the server, but all preceding messages would be deleted
from the server. Under the same circumstances, NetMail for DOS would download
up to and including the message with one or more lines having 1024 characters,
but on that message would keep adding whitespace or carriage returns-linefeeds
forever, or until I hit Ctrl-C. Then all messages would remain on the server.
Fortunately, when that happened, I had UKA_PPP aka NOS-BOX set up, and the POP3
program downloaded all messages without snagging. X_* mail and news programs
run under DOS with TCPPORT.EXE, and in a DOS box from OS/2 connection using
COMTCP.EXE, which is part of OS/2 Warp 4 package, installed in directory
\TCPIP\DOS\BIN.
Now I wonder about other email clients for DOS, Windows and Linux/Unix, whether
they would get snagged by a line of 1024 characters or anything else that might
constitute rough treatment. That question might apply to news downloads too.
I still wonder just what snagged the download with Arachne/Insight. Somebody
whose mail download gets snagged with Arachne/Insight ought to report the snag
to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
