Pegasus Mail & Mercury

Hi all

I've used mercury and pegasus for ages on my dads desktop (where it works fine), but have recently installed it on my laptop and am having a problem.

When e-mails without attachments are downloaded they come down as normal, but when mail with an attachment is downloaded the email is re-dowbloaded whenever mercury polls for mail - my inbox currently contains about 130 duplicate emails, each containing a 4mb attachment. Mercury uses 50% (1 core) of my CPU while its doing this which would be fine except it does it over and over again.

I had clamwall installed but not enabled so i've un-installed that, and tried turning off any virus checking and my filewall so nothing should be getting in the way or causing a problem. I read in the knowledgebase that problems can occur using mercury on a multi-processor PC and have set the affinity to be a single core to see if that made any difference but it doesn't.

Any ideas?

Computer Spec:
Processor   - Intel Core2 1.66Ghz (t5500)
Memory      - 4gb
OS             - XP MCE SP3 (same happened on SP2)
Mercury      - v4.52
Pegasus     - v4.41

Thanks for your time :)

Turn on session logging for mercD and record a download session.

I would suspect a timeout issue with the connection being broken before the 'delete' command is processed.

 

Looks like you're right :)

09:16:20.171: >> .<cr><lf>
09:16:20.203: << DELE 1<cr><lf>
09:16:20.234: >> -ERR POP timeout<cr><lf>
09:16:20.265: << QUIT<cr><lf>
09:16:20.296: 9: Socket write error 10053 (ECONNABORTED)
09:16:20.343: --- Connection closed normally at Sun May 11 09:16:20 2008. ---

I'll increase the timeout and see what happens

thanks

Strabo:

09:16:20.203: << DELE 1<cr><lf>
09:16:20.234: >> -ERR POP timeout<cr><lf>

0.031 sec from the delete command to the timeout message!

Looks like the server is having an issue, maybe just with this message.

Is there web access to this account. You could log in and delete from the web interface.

I do have web access to them, but this isn't the first (or largest) message its done it with, It seems to be any message with an attachment. the others eventually stopped (I think repeats was the longest before this one) but this one just keeps coming. 

I've doubled the timout and its still happening so i've doubled it again (now 1200!) and have deleted it online.

I cant see it being a problem with the mail server cos I connected to that one from my dads machine :S

Strabo:

I do have web access to them, but this isn't the first (or largest) message its done it with, It seems to be any message with an attachment. the others eventually stopped (I think repeats was the longest before this one) but this one just keeps coming.

I've doubled the timout and its still happening so i've doubled it again (now 1200!) and have deleted it online.

I cant see it being a problem with the mail server cos I connected to that one from my dads machine :S

The POP3/SMTP transmissions may fail if the MTU packet size is so large that a packet is fragmented.  In many cases the receiving system router blocks the receiving servers "packets fragmented" response to the sending system using "MTU Discovery".  These oversize packets are not accepted and so are resent.  This results in a timeout, generally at the end of the message transmission but it can be anywhere in the process.  You need to reduce the MTU size. Windows defaults to a 1500 MTU and many routers and DSL connections need 1492.  You might simply want to turn off the MTU Discovery operation.

You might want to get a copy of SG TCP Optimizer that I find quite handy.  http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php  This little utility will allow you to test your MTU for maximum size without fragmentation against specific servers.  If will also make it easy to adjust the MTU. 

And finally, does this computer, by chance, happen to have an NVidia NForce 4 chipset on the motherboard?  If so, many other have had this exact problem, and it turned out to be an optimization setting for the built in NIC which caused the problems with packet fragmentation. Disabling the advanced optimization capability called "checksum offload" made all the problems of sending SMTP/receiving POP3 mail via WinPMail disappear.

---

Thomas R. Stephenson
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

Downloaded the tool and selected "optimal settings" which set the MTU down to 1492 but that didn't stop the problem, so I set it to custom and disabled MTU Discovery, after restarting it had reverted to being enabled, so i did it again (after turning off my firewall and registry watcher, just in case) and it had still reverted on restart. not sure why, still searching the net to try to find out why that could be.

Not running NForce, the only nVidia is have is a geforce go 7300 graphics card. I still tried to disable checksum offload but I cant find it anywhere, google says that it should be in the advanced tab of my nic but it isn't. :s

Do you have any other system monitoring tools installed, including anti-virus/anti-malware? Also, was your OS pre-installed? Sometimes the OS is customised and is difficult to re-configure. It might be worth a call to the PC supplier to discover if this is the case.