<p>[quote user="Paul"]<font face="Times New Roman"><font face="Arial"> <p>This post in brief: To have the MercuryP POP3 Server give you your emails in the order they were received (FIFO) you must use FAT32. If you use NTFS they will be mixed up.</p></font></font>[/quote] I just want to make it clear that you mustn't rely on the order of messages provided by a POP3 server  - ANY POP3 server, not just Mercury. The RFCs for the protocol make no mention of ordering, which means that there is no standard interpretation. If Mercury presents messages in a particular order because of a foible of the underlying file system, then that is an accident, not a matter of design. Now, with the preceding paragraph in mind, it *would* be possible to add a degree of sorting to MercuryP - quite easy, in fact... But it would always have to be a specifically settable option. I'll take a look at the code and see just what might be practical. Cheers! -- David --  </p>

<FONT face="Times New Roman"><FONT face=Arial> <P>This post in brief: To have the MercuryP POP3 Server give you your emails in the order they were received (FIFO) you must use FAT32. If you use NTFS they will be mixed up.</P> <P>This post in detail: We have been using Mercury32 for five years running on Windows 98SE. It worked well and the MercuryP POP3 Server gave us our emails in the order they were received (FIFO). The CNM file names seemed rather strange and mixed up but that did not cause any problems. About two months ago I finally upgraded to a much faster machine and installed Windows XP Pro using NTFS. Very soon I noticed that the MercuryP POP3 Server was no longer giving the emails in the order they were received (FIFO). This simply was not acceptable. In researching the problem I found some earlier discussion of this in the Mercury archives. Apparently, some people do not care if emails arrive in their inbox in random order. However, for some of us it does matter. And sorting with email clients does not really solve the problem, at least not in some cases. So after careful investigation and actual testing I discovered that MercuryP presents the emails in whatever default order the files appear in the Mercury Mail folders or subdirectories. With FAT32 they appear in the order they were stored which results in FIFO. This is true for both Win98 and XP. With NTFS (tested on XP Pro) the default order is alphabetical. Hence with FAT32 they come to you FIFO and with NTFS they come to you all mixed up since Mercury32 gives them seemingly random names.</P> <P>The solution for me was to reinstall XP Pro using FAT32. Actually, it is only necessary that the CNM files be in a FAT32 directory.</P> <P>It seems like it would be very simple to modify Mercury to have it assign a sequential name for the CNM files, like AAAAAAAA, AAAAAAAB, AAAAAAAC, ..., ZZZZZZZZ. (This would only be for files that Mercury needs to name and currently gives a seemingly random name.) At the rate of 1 million emails per day it would take 570 years before Mercury would have to reuse a name. Mercury already uses sequential naming schemes for other things (for example the SMTP connection ID is an 8 digit sequential hexadecimal number. Using a hexadecimal name like that at the rate of 1 million emails per day it would take 11 years before Mercury would have to reuse a name). For those people for whom FIFO does not matter this scheme should not bother them. For those of us for whom FIFO is very important a scheme like this would allow us to use FAT32 or NTFS.</P> <P>-Paul</P></FONT></FONT>