> > the clients email software would reach its mail check time and abort the
> > current download and start over. This is buggy client code, not the
> > server. :) When we have a customer call, we tell them to turn of the
> > auto mail check, perform a manual download and restart the auto mail
check
> > after the manual check completes. This has worked every time for us.
>
> Thats interesting. I'd never have thought of that. I will certainly keep
> that handy the next time a user is complaining about this. :)
>
Sometimes it not just a big file that causes a hanging of Outlook, etc. I'm
always looking for some rhyme or reason to why Outlook, OE, and other MTAs
hang up in rare cases on certain items. I have probably 1500 dialup-type
customers who check their mail exclusively with OE on my qmail server, and
I get an average of about 1 call per day from a customer who is having OE
hang on an item. I've just learned to live with this. I usually talk the
customer into letting me delete the offending item. But when it happens to
me on my own mail, I get more curious. Day before yesterday it happened to
me on a item that was I was trying to retrieve from the ezmlm mailing list.
When I went into the file on the mail server with a text editor (joe), I
noticed that there were five control characters near the end of the file.
They looked like an underlined @ symbol in joe. Then, using joe, I simply
backspaced over the five characters, and save the file. I then tried again
to retrieve the file with OE and voila! it worked. When I pull the file
into a dos-based text editor in binary mode, it shows them as the NUL char,
hex 00. I'm not sure whether this editor is showing the actual data, or
just replacing the characters with NUL.
I guess the only questions are: where did the control chars come from, and
if they are some uncontrollable artifact of transmission, should OE be able
to retrieve the item even though they are present.
If anyone wants to examine this file, I have saved it in its original form
with the control characters and would be happy to send it.
Dennis Duval
