[17303] in Athena Bugs
netscape eats mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Fri Oct 22 19:12:02 1999
Date: Fri, 22 Oct 1999 19:11:57 -0400 (EDT)
Message-Id: <199910222311.TAA04294@x15-cruise-basselope.mit.edu>
To: bugs@mit.edu
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
Tuesday marked the third time I've seen this bug report in a
walkin question in the SIPB office in the past three weeks or so.
I believe that means it merits a bug report.
As a nominal aside, is there any commentary with respect
to my text of 15 September in bugs[17182]?:
/ I suppose you could certainly claim I had been remiss in reporting
/ this sort of bug. I have received the general impression that it is
/ not worth reporting "well-known" netscape bugs because, even should
/ netscape fix them if we reported them to them, we don't bother to
/ report them to netscape.
/
/ Fundamentally, I think we should explore a commercial support relationship
/ with Netscape given the dominance it has in our environment, but I suppose
/ that is truly irrelevent to this discussion.
In any event, it appears that Occasionally, when using Netscape Mail,
a user will have netscape mail incorporate new mail, and the new
messages will not show up in Netscape's list of messages. In fact,
it behaves as if they have been incorporated and subsequently
deleted. If one looks at the $HOME/nsmail/Inbox, one can see the
messages there. If one attempts to get new mail again, nothing happens.
If one exits Netscape and restarts it, the messages are gone forever.
The workaround seems to be to copy the Inbox file elsewhere and then
load it up as new folder in Netscape.
Anyhow, this seems relatively serious as bugs go, since it causes
people using Netscape mail to lose pretty badly. After a while,
repeating "Nescape mail is not supported, you are just plain screwed"
is rather unpleasant.
Looking at olc logs, it appears that this has affected at least
a few users there too:
[31616] (60) 08/19/99 15:20 netscape mail lost
[31727] (148) 09/09/99 14:29 **I'm using Netscape as my emailing. Today there happens a prob
[31964] (85) 10/20/99 14:51 **I use netscape mail to get message. There are 6 new message I
[31976] (517) 10/21/99 14:44 (long) lost mail from netscape
(those are from omail -- I removed the usernames)
I don't really know what to do about this. Perhaps some sort of
instrumentation could be added to netscape-movemail. I've never
actually seen the problem from start-to-finish, since that would seem
to require using Netscape Mail a lot. So there may be important
details with respect to reproducing the problem that I do not know.
In none of the case that I looked at were the users over quota.
Go figure.
--jhawk
