OT: Outlook/OE POP3 errors (was [Mimedefang] Not sure if correlation...)

[Kris Deugau]

Shawn Button wrote:
> We have a few Outlook clients across Outlook 2000 and 2003 that
> basically choke and timeout when popping into the server.

This is not unique to Outlook;  Outlook Express of several versions does
this too.  Netscape may *occasionally* do this, but not nearly as often
as Outlook/OE.

In short, Outlook/OE try to open the attachment as it comes in, and
sometimes this causes a lockup in the POP3 connection's datastream.

In 3 years doing home-user ISP tech support, I've seen this on 3
different POP3 daemons (the one you're using, from the uw-imap package;
occasionally with teapop;  and with Novell's IMS POP3 daemon).

> I believe that a file with standard attachments (xls, doc) is the
> culprit. However, most e-mails and attachments work fine.

Yep.  And if the sender sends another copy of the *exact same
attachment*, it'll usually get through fine.

> If I delete
> the mail in the user's queue then the queue becomes accessible again
> until a message that it doesn't like comes in.

Yep.

> I do have an e-mail that I created with a couple xls attachments and
> I can send it to a users mailbox and it then becomes inaccessible...

This is more consistent behaviour than I've seen.

> it seems as though some scanning process is perhaps modifying the
> header in a way that makes outlook choke. I had seen this often under
> Outlook 97 but never under 2000 or 2003.

Someone else suggested attempting the POP3 download manually;  that will
almost certainly NOT fail.  :/  It's a client-side bug of some kind that
seems to rely on something in the message that isn't there, or that
makes assumptions about the message that aren't true.  My guess is that
it assumes that there are more bytes of data to be sent for some of
these messages than there are bytes of message for the server to send,
and so the client sits waiting for more input when the server has
already sent "\n.\n" (which is *supposed* to indicate "No more data").

-kgd
-- 
"Sendmail administration is not black magic.  There are legitimate
technical reasons why it requires the sacrificing of a live chicken."
   - Unknown