[7531] in SIPB bug reports
Re: Missing message
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jacob Morzinski)
Wed Mar 29 02:11:59 2000
Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 02:11:55 -0500 (EST)
From: Jacob Morzinski <jmorzins@MIT.EDU>
Reply-To: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
To: Kenward Ma <kenward@MIT.EDU>
Cc: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.21L.0003281737320.5907-100000@scrubbing-bubbles.mit.edu>
Message-Id: <Pine.GSO.4.21L.0003290129580.5726-100000@hodge-podge.mit.edu>
Mime-Version: 1.0
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On Tue, 28 Mar 2000, Kenward Ma wrote:
> While I was using pine to check my mails, an error saying "message 1 of 2
> received before error occured," and then I couldn't find the second
> message anywhere. I don't know what the error was, but 1 message is in
> INBOX and the other disappeared. Could you please check to see if it's
> still in the POP server?
Rats -- it would have been helpful to know what the error was.
(Pine keeps a journal of error messages, visible if you hit "J"
at the main menu. If this happens again, I can be more helpful
if I know what pine says happened.)
I've seen behavior with error messages like the error messages
you describe. In the cases I've seen mail was not lost, but pine
was confused about the mail until pine was quit and restarted.
The thing that I'm thinking of is that you may have run pine with
an INBOX that was completely empty -- a zero-length file. A
design flaw in pine causes pine to get very confused when dealing
with empty mail files. It will save the first message to your
INBOX, and then print the error message and leave all other
messages on the server.
A mundane work-around for this issue is to always leave at least
one message in your INBOX. An arcane work-around is to remove
all messages from your INBOX (save them elsewhere), quit pine,
and them remove the (zero-length) file ~/mail/inbox . When you
restart pine, pine will create a new inbox with a special
invisible message. The invisible message will always remain in
your inbox, which will prevent the bug from recurring.
Please let me know if this doesn't seem to explain what happened.
Sincerely,
Jacob Morzinski jmorzins@mit.edu
MIT SIPB
