Pegasus Mail & Mercury

Hi,
Since several months I Pmail has unpredictable crashes in windows Vista when opening or previewing messages. Sometimes this does't happen for days; on other times it happens several times per hour.

I have monitored disk access by PMail with the help of Sysinternals' Proces Monitor and saw that on the last occasion there was an access violation shortly before PMail crashed ('stopped working' in Vista terms). The file in question is G:\Users\Hans\AppData\Local\Temp\utf8.tmp. It is the only access violation in thousands of disk accesses. This file has a creation date of about the same time PMail crashed.

Details:

375912    11:31:05,0617550    winpm-32.exe    7336    CreateFile    G:\Users\Hans\AppData\Local\Temp\utf8.tmp    SHARING VIOLATION    Desired Access: Read Attributes, Delete, Synchronize, Disposition: Open, Options: Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Open Reparse Point, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Write, Delete, AllocationSize: n/a

Could this be connected to the crashes? How to resolve them? I have been a long time user of PMail, but if this continues I will have to give up on it. (I would hate that). I would appreciate it very much if anyone could bring some light in this situation.

My only guess (I do not use Vista and probably won't for a few more years) is that some other program is accessing WinPMail's files so it can't open them with exclusive access.  The first suspect, as always, is yuor anti-virus software.

 

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

That sounds very strange, do you run Pegasus as admin when the error occurs ?

You can also try this tool,

 http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/opened_files_view.html

maybe it tells you what other program locks this file.

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kind regards

Thomas, Tigershark,

 Thanks for the suggestions. I'll check them out both and let you know the results. I do not run Pegasus in Admin mode normally. I tried that but it makes no difference.

Hans 

Thank you for your comments on the problem reported above. I also relative frequently experience Pegasus Mail  crashes when opening the new mail folder. I use Windows XP.

Here the most recent Dr. Watson report:

Application exception occurred:
        App: E:\DFUE\PMAIL\winpm-32.exe (pid=2804)
        When: 2/21/2008 @ 16:39:53.578
        Exception number: c0000005 (access violation)

I often observe that Pegasus Mail is in the process of filtering the mails (spamfilter) when these crashes occur.

 My question: is there a way to solve this problem if this is caused by antivirus software accessing WinPMail's files? Is Pegasus mail not compatible with antivirus software checking incoming mail?

Thanks in advance for your comments

 

> Thank you for your comments on the problem reported above. I also
> relative frequently experience Pegasus Mail  crashes when opening
> the new mail folder. I use Windows XP.
>
> Here the most recent Dr. Watson report:
>
> Application exception occurred:
>         App: E:\DFUE\PMAIL\winpm-32.exe (pid=2804)
>         When: 2/21/2008 @ 16:39:53.578
>         Exception number: c0000005 (access violation)
>
> I often observe that Pegasus Mail is in the process of filtering the
> mails (spamfilter) when these crashes occur.
>
>  My question: is there a way to solve this problem if this is caused
> by antivirus software accessing WinPMail's files? Is Pegasus mail
> not compatible with antivirus software checking incoming mail?

WinPMail must have exclusive access to it's files.  Anything trying to grab the files when they are being processed may cause a crash.  Some anti-virus software is better than other but in most cases the only solution is to exclude the mailboxes from auto-protect.  If you want to scan the e-mail then use VirScan.

Name of Program: VIRSCAN: Virus Scanning Extension for Pegasus Mail

Location/Filename <URL:mailto:irelam@telus.net?Subject=send_virscan>
<URL:http://www3.telus.net/public/irelam/>

Author/email contact: Martin Ireland <irelam@telus.net>

Status: Freeware

Documentation: Included in zip file.

Features: Extension to invoke virus scanning program of user choice when Pegasus Mail saves or views mail message attachments.

Defaults to NAI's VirusScan engine. Multi-language support included.  

>
> Thanks in advance for your comments

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

I have some further experience with the crashes on my (Vista) system. They are reproducable and occur after 1-20 views of different mails. Viewing or previewing gives the same result. After the crash there is a file as mentioned in my first mail about this phenomenon: G:\users\hans\AppData\Local\Temp\utf8.tmp. This file contains the message last viewed. In Sysinternal's Process Monitor this file has a Sharing Violation.

It makes no difference whether virus protection (Bitdefender) or spamfilters or spamhalter are switched on or not: always the same result. After restarting Pegasus this file is gone and another file g:\Users\Hans\AppData\Local\Temp\WPM$1185.PM$, also with the message viewed as content appears in this directory.

This behavior has never occurred under windows 2000 which I used before Vista. 

Thanks for any comments, Hans 

Hi Thomas,

 I am quite certain now that your guess that my antivirus program is causing the crashes, is correct. I was able to trace (in the Windows Event Manager) the first crashes to december 14th. That happened to be the same day I installed Bitdefender 2008 on my computer. Moreover, when I disable the realtime protection, I can access the (pre-)view of mails hundreds of times without any crashes. Would it be possible to exclude the (system-)directory where the access violations occur from the autoprotection? How can this be accomplished?

In any case I'll report this problem to the vendor of Bitdefender. I would characterize this to be a faulty mechanism in THEIR software.

Thanks for any comments. 

Almost all anti-virus software can be set to exclude files and folders, I do not know how this is done in BitDefender but I suspect it's possible.  FWIW, all anti-virus software has the same flaw, it does not allow the calling program to access it's files and this can cause way more problems than it solved.  I've pointed out VirScan that allows you to do this under the control of WinPMail, you might check that extension out after you have removed the mail directories from the realtime protection..

 

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

In the meantime I have found out how this folder can be excluded. I'll see how it goes for a few days and report the results. Thanks.

Problem solved! Since my last posting I have had no further crashes for several weeks, so it seems that excluding above mentioned directory from access by the anti-virus program solved the problem.

Thanks for everybodies comments,

Hans 

Hi Thomas,

I am about to exclude the mail directories from Bit Defender, but wonder what happens when a virus is in an incoming mail?

All the best to you,

Ellie

> Hi Thomas,
>
> I am about to exclude the mail directories from Bit Defender, but
> wonder what happens when a virus is in an incoming mail?

You get a virus message in your inbox.  No big deal unless you actually open the message and then open the virus laden attachment.  I would recommend you use VirScan if you are worried about this.  

Name of Program: VIRSCAN: Virus Scanning Extension for Pegasus Mail

Location/Filename <URL:mailto:irelam@telus.net?Subject=send_virscan>
<URL:http://www3.telus.net/public/irelam/>

Author/email contact: Martin Ireland <irelam@telus.net>

Status: Freeware

Documentation: Included in zip file.

Features: Extension to invoke virus scanning program of user choice when Pegasus Mail saves or views mail message attachments.

Defaults to NAI's VirusScan engine. Multi-language support included.  

---

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

Hi Ellie,

I am responding to your mail. It is also an update on my solution reported above. You wrote:

 

 

Of course the common point for me in Bit Defender. My mail is stored in mailboxes on an XP server, running SP2.

I seem to be unable to stop it scanning the mail, whatever I do. I have the option unchecked in both the reading computer (which is Vista) and on the incoming mail server (which is XP) and so it should not be happening. But it does. Is this perhaps related to Mercury that is processing my incoming mail? I wouldn't know what to do there and this is not the forum to ask, I know.

Cheers!

Ellie