Re: [NTLK] Ramblings and Wishes

From: Dave Bonhoff (GTIDave_at_golden.net)
Date: Fri Sep 13 2002 - 08:20:29 PDT


Jeremy Bond Shepherd wrote:

> At 03:04 AM 9/11/2002 -0400, "Dave Bonhoff" <gtidave_at_golden.net>wrote:
>
> >- On occasion Simple Mail will have trouble retrieving mail from my ISP.
> >It will connect, deleate 'deleated' messages and then hang while checking
> >for new mail. I will not be able to dowload new messages to my Newt until
> >I clear out my mailbox by downloading all my messages to my Powerbook. I'm
> >guessing that this is an issue with my ISP. Thoughts?
>
> My thoughts:
>
> There is apparently an MTU/MRU bug in NIE's PPP stack. If too large a PPP
> packet is sent from the host, NIE will hang indefinitely. This only happens
> on PPP (e.g., modem) links. I get it after SimpleMail issues a UIDL command
> to the POP3 server (or I manually issue the command from a telnet session)
> and I have too many messages -- it receives part of the output but hangs
> when it gets too long. I also get this when telnetting into a UNIX host and
> doing an Octal Dump (OD) of a long file... the first X bytes come down
> fine, then it hangs. Try the same exact activities with a TCP/IP link and
> it works fine.
>
> Are you using a modem? If so, can you try using Ethernet instead and see
> what happens?

I rarely use my modem. This problem occurs when using either my ethernet card
or WiFi... It happened again this morning. Part way through downloading new
mail, it hung. I eventually closed the slip and tried to receive simple mail
again. It would hang while checking for mail. I used webmail to access my
inbox and deleted a large email with attachments, and tried simple mail
again. Didn't go. Then I tried freezing extensions and deleting stores, but
still nothing worked. I then used my powerbook to download all my remaining
email and immediately after, simple mail was able to access my mailbox again.
I'm really wondering if it is a problem with my ISP, but have yet to call them
as they will probably just tell me that my Newt is not a supported platform...

> Also, this bug does not seem to manifest itself when using IMAP instead of
> POP3 -- I presume it's due to a difference in the length of IMAP
> commands/responses for new mail query compared to UIDL for POP3.
>
> www.mail2pda.com works pretty well for a Web interface to view your POP3 or
> IMAP e-mail and avoids the issue entirely.

I'll keep that in mind if I can't get another solution that is KISS.

Thanks!
Dave

-- 
Read the List FAQ/Etiquette: http://www.newtontalk.net/faq.html
Read the Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/
This is the NewtonTalk mailing list - http://www.newtontalk.net/


This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon May 26 2003 - 12:59:21 PDT