On Tue, Dec 04, 2001 at 04:45:09PM +0100, Tom Van de Wiele wrote: > hello > > I've setup a sendmail server for SMTP and qpopper 3.1.2 for POP3 > accounts. Qpopper is great and works really well BUT I have a problem: > All our mailclients are Microsoft Entourage or Microsoft Outlook (I can > see your faces now, but that isn't the real problem). We have a couple > of mailboxes that have, by now, about 300 mails in them. When I try to > get the mail of one of those accounts, Microsoft Entourage crashes, > giving me an error 3, unexpected error. (Microsoft Outlook does the same > thing) After that, you can check the mail, but it isn't there (qpopper > moved it from /var/spool/mail/ to /var/dropmail).
This sounds like an old qpopper 3 behavior, if I'm remembering correctly. It sounds like your qpopper is not properly handling the condition where the client has "gone away" unexpectedly, and therefore does not put the spool back. Qpopper 4.0.3 should handle this; I'm pretty sure we used to see this style of behavior but no longer do. So that would be my first recommendation - upgrade qpopper. It's a fairly painless transition, and you will also have an easier time getting help with a newer version. > After a few minutes, > its back in /var/spool/mail, waiting to be downloaded. The real problem is: why are Entourage and Outlook crashing? It might be cured by a qpopper upgrade, but that's probably wishful thinking on my part. (Though I think we have this type of problem less with qpopper 4.0 than we used to.) Usually in my experience it's not just a large mailbox, but some specific email message in the spool with unusual or malformed headers which crashes them. If you can edit the user's mail spool using some other mail program (while making sure that it doesn't concurrently get checked with qpopper) and remove the offending message, then usually the user is able to get their mail and things go forward normally from then on. If you can't figure out which is the offending message, try binary search or "divide and conquer" - make a backup copy of their mailbox, delete half of the messages, and see if they can download it now; if so, try them on the other half of the messages (restored from your backup); if they crash again, delete half of the messages remaining in that portion of the mailbox, and repeat until you've narrowed it down to the offending one. It's a pain but better than just suffering with the problem indefinitely. -- Clifton -- Clifton Royston -- LavaNet Systems Architect -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] WWJD? "JWRTFM!" - Scott Dorsey (kludge) "JWG" - Eddie Aikau
