[comp.sys.mac.comm] popper server

da@cs.brown.edu (David Ascher) (02/19/91)

This isn't mac-centered, but does affect all the people on this
newsgroup who use UCB's "popper" as a POP3 server.

It appears that if the connexion between _popper_ and the client
(eudora, etc.) dies in the middle of retrieving a set of mail
messages, the server loses all the mail messages for that user.  

Scenario:
  User logs on to Eudora, "Checks for mail".  Say there are a hundred
messages in his/her mailbox, it takes a while to transfer.  At message
10, the mac crashes, the network goes down -- the connexion dies.
When s/he checks for mail with Eudora the next time, there are no mail
messages.  This is obviously a bug with popper.  Has anyone else
noticed it before?  Does anyone have a fix?

Thanks for any info.

--david ascher
--brown university CIS
--DASCHER@Brownvm.Brown.Edu
--
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da@cs.brown.edu (Internet)  uunet!brunix!da  (uucp)  da@browncs.bitnet (bitnet)
Box 3209, Brown University, Providence RI 02912 -- (1) (401) 863-4348

dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) (02/24/91)

In article <DA.91Feb18124752@igor.cs.brown.edu> da@cs.brown.edu (David Ascher) writes:
>It appears that if the connexion between _popper_ and the client
>(eudora, etc.) dies in the middle of retrieving a set of mail
>messages, the server loses all the mail messages for that user.  

Something else must be happening.  I regularly crash test versions of Eudora
while transferring mail with popper, and have yet to lose a single message.

I'm running popper 1.7b4 (the final release of popper was 1.7, so I'm a bit
behind the times).  Older versions of popper (1.6) sometimes lost mail under
the right circumstances (not broken connections, but arrival of new mail while
popper had the mailbox open).
--
Steve Dorner, U of Illinois Computing Services Office
Internet: s-dorner@uiuc.edu  UUCP: uunet!uiucuxc!uiuc.edu!s-dorner