Hangs at "Getting number of messages..."

[Brian Morrison]

On Wed, 05 Apr 2000 10:53:30 +0100 (BST), Simon Bowring wrote:

>>Yes, it happens on the OS/2 version also..
>..for you, maybe. It's not happened here AFAIR.
>
>How often do you poll the mail server?  I have heard talk
>of problems with some older linux tcp/ip stacks if you poll 
>for mail too often (more often than about once every 30s 
>ISTR).  I cannot confirm the truth of this!
>

I receive all my mail locally (PMMail calls it smtp delivery) after my
MTA has dropped it in the appropriate directory. PMMail/2 frequently
hangs failing to retrieve new messages, there is no TCPIP traffic
involved. When this occurs the last fetch time does not update, even if
a manual fetch is commanded. Restarting fixes this unless the mail has
no From: line in which case PMMail can't fetch it at all. It is quite
common for one of my main accounts to fail in this way but not the
other.

I have found that this seems to be tied up with how much is in the
trash folder, in that leaving large quantities of deleted mail there
seems to make this happen more frequently. It feels like something is
being corrupted, maybe it's a buffer overrun within the PMMail code or
data space?

I have asked for a fix for this repeatedly but never got one, I'm
hoping that BSW will fix it but in the past I was told that BoB and Ike
could never recreate the failure and thus didn't believe it was a real
bug. It has affected me since some of the early PMMail 2.0 betas, but
has definitely got worse, probably as my mail spool has increased in
size.

-- 
Brian Morrison                                  bdm@fenrir.demon.co.uk
              do you know how far this has gone?
               just how damaged have I become?
                                      'Even Deeper' by Nine Inch Nails