Pegasus Mail & Mercury

Hello,

I've a problem with a single imap folder with a huge amount of messages.

If I try to access this folder mercury will crash always.

Here is a session log from mercury:

11:38:15.515: Connection from 192.168.0.21, Sun Jul 06 11:38:15 2008<lf>
11:38:15.515: << * OK myHost IMAP4rev1 Mercury/32 v4.62 server ready.<cr><lf>
11:38:15.546: >> 1 capability<cr><lf>
11:38:15.546: << * CAPABILITY IMAP4rev1 STARTTLS AUTH=PLAIN X-MERCURY-1<cr><lf>
11:38:15.546: << 1 OK CAPABILITY complete.<cr><lf>
11:38:15.578: >> 2 authenticate plain<cr><lf>
11:38:15.578: << +<cr><lf>
11:38:15.578: >> xxxxxxxxx=<cr><lf>
11:38:15.578: << 2 OK AUTHENTICATE completed.<cr><lf>
11:38:15.609: >> 3 select "myMailbox"<cr><lf>

---> here will mercury crash... 

 
This error I had in mercury/32 v. 4.61 and 4.62. I tried to connect with
squirrelmail an also with Thunderbird v2.

 Mercury/32 running on windows 2008 Server

Whats going wrong?
Could this be a memory problem?
 

 

thanks for help
 

I've a problem with a single imap folder with a huge amount of messages.

What is a huge amount of messages?  How big is the largest message?  Does it crash immediately?

I've never seen this happen even with a lot of messages in a message folder.  I can open a copies to self folder with about 12K messages with SquirrelMail without any problem except a long delay. 

I suppose either a system memory or drive problem could cause this sort of crash though if it hits a bad sector.

---

Thomas R. Stephenson
San Jose, California
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

Mercury's system requirements are - as seen on this website:

The Win32 version of Mercury (or Mercury/32 as it is known) runs on Windows 95, 98, NT4, 2000, XP or Windows Server 2003.

Running Mercury under the new Windows-Vista 2008 "Server Edition" (both are the only Windows basing on the "new" NT 6.0 kernel) seems highly experimental to me. You're really running W2008 Server productively? Early adopters often get in trouble...

Yes, I run Mercury on windows 2008 Server. But this is only my personal mailserver
i'ts not a bussines server.
The only problem I have with mercury is this mystical problem with the folder.

The ammount of the messages is perhaps 2k in comparision with 12k very small ;)

Yes, Mercury crash immediately when the folder was "clicked" / selected.
 

Have you tried looking at it in Pegasus? (file mode not IMAP)

Check it for consistency & reindex. 

Have you tried moving the mail out of the mailbox?

Does the Mercury/32 have supervisor rights to the mailbox structure, including the problem folder?

Are any of these messages really huge?

Personally I'm grasping at straws here, I've no clue why Mercury/32 scanning of the cnm files and folders would cause Mercury/32 to crash unless there is some sort of a hardware problem.  Since Mercury/32 delivered the mail to this mailbox I can't see why it should have any problems with the mail structure.itslf at all.

 

---

Thomas R. Stephenson
San Jose, California
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

After checking for hardware problems (i.e. bad sector on the disk) it can be a good idea to take a look at other applications that are running on the same machine. Realtime anti-virus scanners can cause a lot of strange errors, for instance. In this case I would check the name of the selected mail folder as well: does it contain any non-English characters, hidden control characters etc. that possibly could confuse Mercury?

/Rolf 

Is there a chance to copy your installation to another computer - one with XP or Server 2003?
If the problem does not occur there, it's something OS-related. It's likely that some code has
to be updated since the new wins (Vista , Server2008) handle NTFS differently than former ones.

A quote:

With self-healing NTFS, an NTFS worker thread is spawned in the background which performs a localized fix-up of damaged data structures, with only the corrupted files/folders remaining unavailable without locking out the entire volume and needing the server to be taken down. The operating system now features S.M.A.R.T. detection techniques to help determine when a hard disk may fail. This feature was first presented within Windows Vista.

What does Windows itself tell you about the crash? The new event-manager is said to be more helpful tracking errors than before...

now I have  downloaded Pegasus and connected to the mailbox with
the file mode. There I've clicked on the option "check consistency" from the
folder who crashes mercury. 

Then the screen appears: 

 

 

After this I reindexed the folder.. Then I tried again with the commandn "check consistency"
the same screen will appear... how in the image

But now I can connect to the folder!
Now, I have in the folder a lot of messages with a unknown sender. If I delete this with Pegasus
the will appear again by reindexing...

 

 

Sounds like the index and/or the folder is really hosed.   Use Pegasus Mail and

1.  Move all the messages you want to save to a temp folder and
    delete all the messages in the original folder.

2.  Use the right click "recover deleted space" to remove all
    messages form the folder.

3.  If step 2 works then simply move all of the messages from the
    temp folder back to the original folder and delete the temp
    folder.

4.  If step 2 fails then delete the original folder and rename the
    temp folder to match the original name.  Reset the filter
    pointing to this folder.

---

Thomas R. Stephenson
San Jose, California
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

I've followed your instructions step by step and now it works without problem.

Thank you all for yours hints and tipps!

 

 

Thomas R. Stephenson:

Sounds like the index and/or the folder is really hosed.   Use Pegasus Mail and

1.  Move all the messages you want to save to a temp folder and
    delete all the messages in the original folder.

2.  Use the right click "recover deleted space" to remove all
    messages form the folder.

3.  If step 2 works then simply move all of the messages from the
    temp folder back to the original folder and delete the temp
    folder.

4.  If step 2 fails then delete the original folder and rename the
    temp folder to match the original name.  Reset the filter
    pointing to this folder.

We are getting a similar error on a Win2k box (Faulting application mercury.exe, version 4.6.1.0, faulting module mercury.exe, version 4.6.1.0, fault address 0x00059b3c.), but have more users who have more mail folders. Is there a way in Mercury or another program, that will go through the mailboxes and reindex all of the mail in all of the users directories?

This has happened with various versions of Mercury since about 4.5-ish.

 

We are getting a similar error on a Win2k box (Faulting application mercury.exe, version 4.6.1.0, faulting module mercury.exe, version 4.6.1.0, fault address 0x00059b3c.), but have more users who have more mail folders. Is there a way in Mercury or another program, that will go through the mailboxes and reindex all of the mail in all of the users directories?

There is a tool that comes with WinPMail PB1 that will do this.  Checkout MBXMAINT.exe in the WinPMail PB1 program directory.  It will Move, Check, Repair or Compress a mailbox.  It has a command line option but if you go through all user directories doing this make sure that they are all logged out.

 

 

 

 

---

Thomas R. Stephenson
San Jose, California
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

Thomas R. Stephenson:

We are getting a similar error on a Win2k box (Faulting application mercury.exe, version 4.6.1.0, faulting module mercury.exe, version 4.6.1.0, fault address 0x00059b3c.), but have more users who have more mail folders. Is there a way in Mercury or another program, that will go through the mailboxes and reindex all of the mail in all of the users directories?

There is a tool that comes with WinPMail PB1 that will do this.  Checkout MBXMAINT.exe in the WinPMail PB1 program directory.  It will Move, Check, Repair or Compress a mailbox.  It has a command line option but if you go through all user directories doing this make sure that they are all logged out.

Where can I get WinPMail PB1?

 Where can I get WinPMail PB1?

 "A public beta of Pegasus Mail v4.5 is now available for anyone who wishes to do so to try out. The beta is very complete and stable, but is provided without formal technical support - you should almost certainly apply due diligence testing to it before using it in a production environment.

You can download the public beta from http://download-us.pmail.com/w32-450-pb1.exe, or a full German version of the beta from http://download-us.pmail.com/w32-451-de-pb1.exe (and yes, we realize they appear to have different version numbers).

Peter Stromblad will post an announcement telling you about new beta-related forums that will be made available in the community in the near future - using these forums, you can discuss the beta and provide feedback if you wish.

Please read the "What's new" notes in the beta installer or help file for information on the v4.5 release.

Cheers to all!

-- David --"

---

Thomas R. Stephenson
San Jose, California
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team