Eudora can't talk pop (like smtp) for large email
John Gianni
Q: How does one talk pop (telnet cds9200 pop) to debug mail download issues?
****************************************************************************
One can "telnet mail-server pop", but, pop doesn't seem to have a "help" or
manpage like smtp, ftp, etc. does.
Even tho I download mail every 5 minutes & auto-delete mail from the
smtp server using Win95 Eudora (3.05), about once a week or so, my
incoming mail volume is so great that pop seems to give up. It no longer
downloads email. Forever.
Eudora seems to "hide" the pop error message (if there is any).
All Eudora says is "Sorry, you don't have any new mail."
Even though my mail server may be receiving hundreds of emails per hour,
forevermore, Eudora will say I don't have any new mail. The spool file
just grows and grows and grows.
Manually, I've been solving the problem immediately by moving the spool
file & letting the very next email auto-create a new spool tiny file.
This works, but, all the moved mail is unavailable to Eudora.
I can read, from a PC telnet session, the old mail using Berkely mail:
mail -s /var/mail/john_070699_bad_spool_file
But, that is obviously insufficient for MIME-encoded & other attachments.
Typically, I then split the bad spool file into quarters or eights (taking
care not to munge any individual email message) and then concatonat to
the end of the newly created spool file:
cat /var/mail/john_070699_bad_spool_file_1 >> /var/mail/john
This works to save the moved email, but, this process suffers from
inefficiency, danger (e.g., I have to check there is no lock file present
indiciating incoming mail at that moment), etc.
Switching to IMAP isn't in the cards because IMAP is horrible (IMHO) for
portable PCs.
============================================================================
What I'd like to do is find out EXACTLY what error POP is getting.
Q: How does one talk pop (telnet mail-server pop) to debug Eudora issues?
============================================================================
For example, to 'talk smtp':
unix% telnet cds9200 smtp
> help
> helo pc-john.cadence.com
> mail from: john
> rcpt to: andrewb
> data
> Subject: This is a test of smtp
> <blank line>
> Body of message goes here.
> .
unix%
Does anyone know how to talk POP to debug pop issues?
I just want to find the error message POP is getting.
Thx,
John Gianni
( Please courtesy cc jo...@cadence.com )
Tim Frost
> ****************************************************************************
> Q: How does one talk pop (telnet cds9200 pop) to debug mail download issues?
> ****************************************************************************
>
> One can "telnet mail-server pop", but, pop doesn't seem to have a "help" or
> manpage like smtp, ftp, etc. does.
>
>
POP-3 has a clear sequence of commands, documented in the RFCs,
specifically RFC 1939 (which has some good example dialogs)
Basically, you authenticate to a standard POP-3 server with
USER me
PASS my-password
it should respond with a message, starting with +OK, at each stage.
If your user name/password fail the authetication, you will get an
error message, starting -ERR, such as:
user me
+OK User name accepted, password please
pass you
-ERR Bad login
user my-real-username
+OK User name accepted, password please
pass my-real-password
+OK Mailbox open, 0 messages
quit
So I had no messages in that mailbox.
Another server requires me to use the STAT command to get the
message count:
user me
+OK
pass my-password-on-this-server
+OK User successfully logged on
stat
+OK 204 1234567
quit
which tells me that there are 204 messages and over 1MB ;-( in that
mailbox.
The POP-3 servers that I used for this example don't do a check on
the user name until after they have the password as well, so they
always returns +OK to the USER command.
Also, the commands are case-insensitive (although the user and
password are case-sensitive :-)
NOTE: The password here is dsplayed as CLEAR TEXT as you type it,
so anyone looking over my shoulder would have seen the password
during the dialog.
Hope this helps
>
> I just want to find the error message POP is getting.
It would NOT surprise me if Eudora is choking on the size of the
first message.