Seeing the same emails again
mm
Do ISPs ever have crashes, and then restore their system such that it
lists emails that have been downloaded already as if they haven't
been?
mm
<inv...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>On Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:16:21 -0500, mm <NOPSAM...@bigfoot.com>
>wrote:
Thanks for replying.
>Look at your settings under Tools => Options => Incoming Mail and tell
>us whether "Leave mail on server" is checked.
Yes, I keep my mail for one day. Sometimes I extend this to 2 or 3
days until I can solve a problem.
>If you only check mail from one computer there is no good reason - at
>least in my opinion - to have this turned on.
Here's another reason. I sometimes want to read my email on the same
computer but with another email program. For a variety of reasons,
but yesterday the reason was that Eudora doesn't handle all alphabets.
So, only Eudora is set to delete email. The other programs are always
set not to. (This was easier when I had dial-up and I wasnt' always
connected to the net. Now with a new program I'm testing, I have to be
careful I don't dl and delete eamils before I figure out how to turn
off the deleting.)
>If it's turned on
>:"just in case" you lose your saved mail from your computer, then I'd
And that happened once too. I had just dl'd the mail and looked at
one email when my computer craashed, and somehow when I restarted it,
all my email was there except the several emails I had just gotten.
This was with Eudora, some previous version many years ago. I don't
understant how that could happen, since I was able to read one of the
emails, but it did, and I don't want it to happen again. (I don't
know what info I lost, and I hadn't read completely the one I started
to read.)
>say you're better off turning it off and instead periodically backing
>up your mail database locally rather than counting on your ISP to keep
>it safe just in case.
I don't think that would help either of the two reasons above.
But my question was too vague, I admit, or perhaps not stated at all.
I'm trying to figure out how I do nothing special and still get groups
of emails that I've already recevied.
Do ISPs ever, or at least can they, have a crash that causes them to
restore their files to a previous date (and maybe apply a "change
file" that keeps track of incoming mail for the time in between the
time of the backup and the current time) such that there restored file
doesn't know that I have already downloaded some of the emails, and I
would end up dl'ing the same mail twice.
Or another thing that might account for my seeing repeat emails.
Eudora has an option, Fetch all mail headers to In Mailbox -- Does
everyone know about that? -- Maybe there is some accelerator key,
shortcut key, that has caused me to do that when I didn't realize I
was doing it????
Or a third possibility: I also have a little used account at Verizon,
where I havent' deleted anything but it only holds about 50 emails
over the past year. I dl the email several times a day whenever I dl
from my other ISP, but that isp I have set to not delete. So once
or twice I've gotten 20 to 40 emails from Verizon that I had already
received before days or weeks earlier. I didnt' do anything special;
they just came on one mail download.
Ever hear of this problem before?
Thanks.
> YMMV.
John H Meyers
> I'm trying to figure out how I do nothing special and still get groups
> of emails that I've already received.
What are the "Data" and "Application" paths
in the "Help" | "About Eudora" screen?
> Do ISPs ever, or at least can they, have a crash that causes them to
> restore their files to a previous date (and maybe apply a "change
> file" that keeps track of incoming mail for the time in between the
> time of the backup and the current time) such that there restored file
> doesn't know that I have already downloaded some of the emails, and I
> would end up dl'ing the same mail twice?
Very imaginative, but no.
POP servers are completely passive, having no idea what you have done
in the past, not even able to recognize whether you have ever connected before.
POP servers simply obey the simple commands they receive from POP mail clients,
which are responsible for managing "leave mail on server" from their own side.
The only thing an ISP can do wrong is to cause arbitrary "unique message IDs"
to fail to remain unchanged. This may happen, but is very infrequent,
and if it occurs, it will affect any and all mail clients the same way.
--
John H Meyers
> Do ISPs ever, or at least can they, have a crash that causes them to
> restore their files to a previous date (and maybe apply a "change
> file" that keeps track of incoming mail for the time in between the
> time of the backup and the current time) such that there restored file
> doesn't know that I have already downloaded some of the emails, and I
> would end up dl'ing the same mail twice?
If a server were restored to a backup
made prior to your last session with that server,
then any client having a "leave mail on server" function
would have deleted from its internal
"remember that these are still on the server" list (LMOS.DAT)
any unique IDs that it had since told the server to delete,
so if any of those older IDs became "un-deleted,"
then they would be re-downloaded,
but newer mail (since that last backup)
would also be lost forever.
If there were a true "journal" file, as you suggest, however,
then it should bring the data completely back up to date again,
deleting old items as well as appending new ones,
which would make the answer "no" again :)
One could always invent some system which would do otherwise,
however, so this theory can always be said to be a possibility.
My previous reply was meant to indicate
that the server does not do the remembering of what client(s)
have downloaded, but each client takes care of remembering for itself.
Most "duplicate download" problems occur when the client's
"remember that these are still on the server" list (LMOS.DAT)
gets out of sync, or entirely lost.
This has been reported to occur, in at least one case,
where a user has attempted to keep "data" in the "programs" folder
on Vista or Windows 7, as well as when these files are read-only,
or lack permissions for the current user, or when Eudora is
abnormally terminated, or the disk starts to fail,
or perhaps when ghosts interfere :)
--
mm
I use either win98SE or winXP and keep my data for several programs
and that which I create by hand in C:\data\ and for Eudora in
C:\Data\Eudora7. The files have no special status, like read-only.
Maybe if this happens again I can post here more promptly and with
more details. In the past I've been busy trying to figure out which
are new and which are old, and are old but I never saw them before, or
old and repeats. And I jsut wanted to process them and get them out
of my hair, and I didn't take the time to ask questions right away.
Next time I'll take more time.
FWIW, and it's not worth much because all the examples happened when I
was running Win98SE on the C: drive. But I can run Eudora from
Win98 on C: or WinXP on D: but the program file is always in
C:\Programs\Eudora7 and the data files are always in C:\Data\Eudora7.
Thanks and thanks to Jim for the replies.
John H Meyers
> For mail downloaded and read by Eudora, the record of what has been
> read is kept on your computer by Eudora, not on the ISP's server.
> The ISP's server keeps the messages, but not their status
> as far as read or unread by Eudora.
> I don't know if this record is kept by Message-ID, which is unique,
> or by some other characteristic that might be affected
> by a crash and restore by the ISP.
"Unique IDs" are assigned by the POP server, and are likely to have
no relation to Message-IDs of extremely varied format and lengths
that were assigned on the sender side
(or could possibly not even always be present).
All the UIDs I've ever seen tend to be of the same length, in fact,
for a given partcular POP server. They basically need only have
two characteristics -- unique for each message in any account,
and always corresponding with the same messages
for any sequence of POP sessions on that account.
When we changed our POP server software on one occasion,
all our UIDs did change, and all users who had left tons of mail
on the POP server were treated to a one-time re-download
of the entire pile.
--
Jim Higgins
Makes sense. The same thing happens if you delete your LMOS.DAT
file(s). Either way it's a problem involving Eudora's list of IDs of
read messages left on the server not matching the IDs of messages on
the server. Whatever the cause, all messages with IDs not found in
LMOS.DAT will be re-downloaded. Obviously if LMOS.DAT is lost
completely all messages left on the server are redownloaded.
So the OP should make sure his LMOS.DAT file(s( are not meddled with -
to the best of his ability - and short of changing mail providers the
rest is out of his control.
--
Please don't be a "Help Vampire"
http://slash7.com/pages/vampires
mm
I'm the OP and I've been reading the thread and thinking about it.
I havent' looked at my files for years but I presume I have two
lmos.dat's, one for each ISP I use. Right?
I'm still using erols.com, at 3 dollars a month for only incoming
email, but for DSL I got verizon, and I'm using that too, and Verizon
has definitely allowed me to dl the same email more than once.
AFAIK, I've never had a problem losing a LMOS.dat file. Doesn't the
date and time on that change every time I get mail. So if I ever have
the problem again, when I notice it, the lmos.dat will already be
recreated, I think.
John H Meyers
> I haven't looked at my files for years but I presume I have
> two lmos.dat's, one for each ISP I use. Right?
Every personality has its own LMOS.DAT file,
plus (in recent versions of Eudora) several recent backups
(.001, .002, .003) which are "aged out" as each update occurs.
The unnamed personality (a/k/a "Dominant") has its files
in the main "spool" subfolder, and named personalities
each have their own named sub-folder under "spool"
If you have an LMOS.DAT file in your main mail "data" folder,
it is a left-over from a very old Eudora (v3 or earlier, I believe),
which IIRC had a different format and also combined all personalities.
--
mm
<wlf...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:02:47 -0500, mm <NOPSAM...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>
>> And that happened once too. I had just dl'd the mail and looked at
>> one email when my computer craashed, and somehow when I restarted it,
>> all my email was there except the several emails I had just gotten.
>> This was with Eudora, some previous version many years ago. I don't
>> understant how that could happen, since I was able to read one of the
>> emails, but it did, and I don't want it to happen again. (I don't
>> know what info I lost, and I hadn't read completely the one I started
>> to read.)
>>
> The In/Out/Trash boxes are kept in RAM during a session and only
>update to disk on exit of the program. So, anything that had been
>downloaded and not moved to some other storage area would have been
>memory-only. Crash.. Next start-up Eudora sees the In/Out/Trash boxes
>that had been in use the previous time the program had been started
>(deleted messages that hadn't been flushed to disk, etc.).
This would certainly account for it.
> This is why it has always been recommended that the In/Out boxes
>should be kept trimmed to a minimum -- any messages you want to keep
>should be filtered to other boxes that you created, as those are always
>disk-based.
Is it recommended that absolutely everything be sent to another
mailbox? I've never heard that, and I've read the manual and hundreds
of posts in this ng. And I've never heard of anyone who does that.
You say "minimum", but minimum is zero. Yet how is one to know which
messages one wants to keep until he has read them. How is he to know
which mailbox to send them to until he has found out what they are
about.
This sounds like a recipe for losing email. It sounds like they did
inadequate testing under adverse conditions or they would have noticed
that email is lost when the system crashes.
Why is there an inbox at all if everything has to be sent to another
mailbox?
John H Meyers
[re keeping size of "system" mailboxes reasonable]
> You say "minimum", but minimum is zero.
For other examples of things taken slightly too far, see:
http://monologues.co.uk/Bob_Newhart/Driving_Instructor.htm
Which comes from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Button-Down_Mind_of_Bob_Newhart
http://trashcars.net/videos/223/bob-newhart-driving-instructor.html
> Is it recommended that absolutely everything be sent to another mailbox?
Some people use filters to actually do that, automatically!
But then the problem simply shifts to the mailboxes to which messages
were automatically transferred, and those have no automatic backups
when they get "compacted" ;-)
--
John H Meyers
[good stuff about using an "Inbox" and "Outbox"
as "work in progress" (temporary) rather than a permanent archive]
> If I ever get the incentive to call Earthlink about a new DSL modem,
> since the 3rd party modem I'm using seems to be blocked from POP3 access
> requiring me to use Dial up to fetch mail...
I've never heard of a DSL that could work at all, yet not work with POP!
Does "3rd party modem" mean something incompatible with Earthlink,
rather than somehow incompatible with a much higher level protocol
than "link" level? Does it have port settings, like a router or firewall?
I've seen some ISPs announcing the end of their dial-up service,
which is too bad -- it seems to be comparable to ending broadcast TV,
so that everyone will need to enrich a cable company at much higher fees :)
--
John H Meyers
Should say "cable or satellite company"
However, provided you have already enriched some high-speed internet ISP,
it seems that you can get TV (and even good old radio) over the internet,
which apparently is causing any "TV-only" service companies some concern,
in the eternal jockeying to try to dominate the market for access.
--
mm
<wlf...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>On Sun, 03 Jan 2010 00:53:28 -0500, mm <NOPSAM...@bigfoot.com>
>declaimed the following in comp.mail.eudora.ms-windows:
>
>>
>> Is it recommended that absolutely everything be sent to another
>> mailbox? I've never heard that, and I've read the manual and hundreds
>> of posts in this ng. And I've never heard of anyone who does that.
>> You say "minimum", but minimum is zero. Yet how is one to know which
>> messages one wants to keep until he has read them. How is he to know
>> which mailbox to send them to until he has found out what they are
>> about.
>>
>> This sounds like a recipe for losing email. It sounds like they did
>> inadequate testing under adverse conditions or they would have noticed
>> that email is lost when the system crashes.
>>
>> Why is there an inbox at all if everything has to be sent to another
>> mailbox?
>
> Look at the IN and OUT boxes in light of an old fashioned office
>tray...
>
> INbox is stuff that has not been looked at yet -- a "to do" stack...
>One would take an item out of the box, examine it, maybe create a reply
>which would be put in the OUTbox, and then either trash the message, or
>put it into a file folder in some filing cabinet.
I like your analogy, but I don't think it solves the probelem I had,
that I lost new email during a crash, because no matter how little
time email stays in the inbox, if it is there at all, for however
little time, and if recently added email can be lost in a crash during
that time, there is a big problem.
But please see my next post, in reply to an earlier post by you or
maybe me in this thread.
It's late though and I think I won't be able to write it tonight
> The OUTbox periodically gets emptied as the replies are sent out to
>the mail system. New messages periodically appear in the INbox. One does
>NOT take a message from the INbox, write a reply, and then put the
>message BACK into the INbox.
>
> I have filters configured to distribute stuff to 8 specific mail
>files (mostly based upon the email address that the mail was sent too [I
>have four separate POP3 email addresses, and about two email addresses
>which forward mail to the primary POP3 -- the filters also set
>personalities for those forwarded items), followed by if it came from a
>mailing list of sorts). The ONLY mail that stays in my IN box is stuff
>that is "stray" -- and that is mostly me sending URLs found while at
>work to my home address, along with some near spam items (reminders from
>Amazon, drugstore.com, etc.) which wouldn't be a great loss.
>
> Even the stuff filtered to those 8 files doesn't stay there -- they
>either get deleted after being read, or dragged to specific archive
>files. That also gets done to anything left in the IN box -- I'll either
>delete or archive them. My IN box rarely has over 10 messages left from
>day to day.
>
> And for the OUT box... Similar... (If I ever get the incentive to
>call Earthlink about a new DSL modem, since the 3rd party modem I'm
>using seems to be blocked from POP3 access requiring me to use Dial up
>to fetch mail) I'd run Eudora on a 30minute check schedule, with "send
>on check" -- so the most that could be lost in a crash is the last 30
>minutes of replies. Messages that have been sent get filtered to -- you
>got it -- another archive file.
mm
>On Fri, 01 Jan 2010 14:35:04 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber
><wlf...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:02:47 -0500, mm <NOPSAM...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
>>
>>> And that happened once too. I had just dl'd the mail and looked at
>>> one email when my computer craashed, and somehow when I restarted it,
>>> all my email was there except the several emails I had just gotten.
>>> This was with Eudora, some previous version many years ago. I don't
>>> understant how that could happen, since I was able to read one of the
>>> emails, but it did, and I don't want it to happen again. (I don't
>>> know what info I lost, and I hadn't read completely the one I started
>>> to read.)
>>>
>> The In/Out/Trash boxes are kept in RAM during a session and only
>>update to disk on exit of the program. So, anything that had been
>>downloaded and not moved to some other storage area would have been
>>memory-only. Crash.. Next start-up Eudora sees the In/Out/Trash boxes
>>that had been in use the previous time the program had been started
>>(deleted messages that hadn't been flushed to disk, etc.).
>
>This would certainly account for it.
I was rash when I wrote my answer that I'm revising now.
On second thought, this this would indeed account for lost eamil
during a crash, but it doesn't conform to what I've experienced in
loads of other crashes, freezes followed by hard restarts (pressing
the restart button that is found on most PC's), or power failures (I
think I've only had one in the last 10 years when I didn't also have a
UPS to keep the computer from crashing, but I may have had others
maybe 15 years ago.)
In all those cases except one I've never lost any email from my inbox
or my outbox. I've had Eudora sessions lasting 4 to 12 hours, maybe
even 24 hours, followed by a crash or freeze, when loads of email has
come in during the session, and several emails, pending and sent, have
newly resided in my outbox. Never have I been missing even one of
them, and I would have noticed most of the times.
What this must mean is that your paragraph above could not be
accurate.
Repeated from above:
>> The In/Out/Trash boxes are kept in RAM during a session and only
>>update to disk on exit of the program.
It couldn't *only* update the harddisk on exit of the program. Those
mailboxes may well be in RAM but they must update the harddrive
according to some other rule.***
>> So, anything that had been
>>downloaded and not moved to some other storage area would have been
>>memory-only. Crash.. Next start-up Eudora sees the In/Out/Trash boxes
>>that had been in use the previous time the program had been started
>>(deleted messages that hadn't been flushed to disk, etc.).
This has never happened except that once.
So afaic, we still haven't accounted for that one time.
So I'm going to continue to keep all incoming email on the server for
one or two days (and lengthen that on occasion, like when I'm having
problems).
And I advise everyone else to do the same thing. All the moreso if
the 7 lines quoted just above are true.
***The crash where I lost an email was 10 to 15 years ago. I don't
remember what version of eudora I was using then, but I've had many
(30 or maybe 50 or 80**) crashes and freezes with Eudora 7.0.1, while
using win98SE. I've only been using XP for 4 months total, and I
don't think I've had a crash yet.
**Crashes and freezes used to really bother me, but now that I always
save what I'm writing frequently and before leaving a window, I never
lose more than a couple lines. I've only had one in the last 9 months
where I had to work to recreate what I'd lost. (Now that I'm in XP, I
expect things will be much better still. It seems so.)
MM Remove nopsam if emailing.
John H Meyers
> no matter how little time email stays in the inbox,
> if it is there at all, for however little time,
> and if recently added email can be lost in a crash during that time,
> there is a big problem.
Have you ever noticed that, for adults,
life insurance premiums always increase with a person's age?
By the same token, if there were an insurance company
willing to issue policies against trashing of mail
in Eudora's permanent built-in mailboxes,
actuaries who examine the statistics
would know to charge premiums that increase
with the amount of messages stored in these mailboxes,
because it has been long observed that the risks increase accordingly,
particularly in older versions of Eudora (a final improvement was reportedly
made even in the upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1, according to Katrina Knight,
though I don't know exactly what changes were made to the program).
If you want some free extra insurance for recent messages,
you can "leave mail on server" for some number of days.
If you then happen to lose any incoming mail that's still
on your incoming server(s), you can always arrange to fetch it again.
Unless you also arrange some other external backup,
you will always be at some risk for loss of everything -- after all,
your disk could completely crash, or your computer burn up in a fire;
how much "insurance" you wish to arrange for varying possibilities
is always up to you, but to say that since neither you nor your computer
has yet suffered some other loss than your recent one,
there's no point in arranging any insurance at all,
is being a bit like the proverbial ostrich,
even if real ostriches themselves don't actually bury their heads in sand :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostrich
--
John H Meyers
> I've had full Eudora logging in place, and it can log-in, query for
> the number of new messages, and then hangs when it requests the first
> message be transferred...
> It isn't just POP3 -- a few months ago the NNTP fetch stopped
> transferring...
> Also... While I can get to "my" pages on Earthlink (eg:
> http://home.earthlink.net/~baron.wulfraed/ ), I can not open the
> Earthlink homepage itself! (hard to submit a trouble report when you
> can't open the submittal page).
> Additional problem sites: Microsoft Update! When the update system
> goes to the "checking for current software" stuff it hangs and times
> out. But if I use dial-up to get through the initial phases, down to
> where one selects the packages to be updated, and THEN disconnect the
> dial-up, the actual packages will download and install!
[...]
So it isn't Eudora -- it's Windows, the DSL modem or other local equipment,
its driver, or Earthlink itself, or that some of these don't get along with others.
Given enough time, everything can be done over dial-up anyway :)
--