jss1941/Angus:

You gentlemen are working with a local copy of pmail, with local mail folders and a local inbox.
The standby issue will never bite you because your files are *local*, they are always "there."

With more and more emphasis being placed on going "green" and saving energy / money, universities such as mine are considering implementing an application that expands the capabilities of MicroSoft’s Standby mode for the monitor and the PC. I think the right terminology here is that Pegasus Mail is a connection-oriented application running on protocol NCP over TCP. Pegasus Mail is NCP file read/write intensive hence lots of data passing through the network. Once the PC enters Standby, the connection is lost and when the PC comes back to life, Pegasus abends. Does anyone have suggestions on how to have the best of both worlds, namely Pegasus Mail and substantial energy savings?

Thank you.

 Jeff

My only suggestion is to shut down Pegasus Mail when it'[s not being used if you are going to use the standby mode.

After coming back from standby (or any other kind of network reconnect), until the connection to the server has been completely reestablished, the networking client (Netware or otherwise) fails the I/O calls, with the result that the OS kills the pmail process because the file handle for pmail.exe is now invalid.

Even when the OS does not kill the pmail process - say because pmail is installed locally - the application barfs because the mail (or mail folder) handles are dead and pmail doesn't have the logic to renew them. This is not something that can be done transparently. Each kind of file needs its own "recover from dead handle" logic.

While what I just mentioned is one way with which an app can recover from the server "going away", with the exception of standby/hibernate such an instance of a server "vanishing" should (ideally) never happen, and can (justifyably) not be taken into consideration. Pmail has however two real bugs that effectively make it incompatible with standby/hibernate.

1. The first bug is that pmail is oblivious to shutdown/hibernate at all. The OS broadcasts a message when it is about to enter sleep/hibernate, but pmail ignores it. At a minimum, it should deal with a standby/hibernate message as if it received a "shut down" message, that is, pmail would tell the system not to proceed if such an event could lead to loss of data (eg unsent messages). Ideally however, pmail would save these unsent messages and allow the standby/hibernate to proceed normally.
   
2. The second bug is pmail's poor implementation of the mailbox.lock hack. The hack is itself ok, a necessary stop-gap, but the way pmail implements it is poor. If this were properly implemented, pmail could (theoretically)

   recover from any exception (e.g. a crash or an instance of a server "going away") without bothering the user with a question only answerable by the technologically savvy. If properly implemented, pmail wouldn't need to ask any questions at all. It would intrinsically know the answer.

Cy
 

Strange.  I do not have this problem running Pmail on Vista.  I frequently "sleep" my Vista laptop, and when I open the lid (waking Vista up) Pmail will continue to work as soon as the Internet connection comes alive.  Pmail is never aborted in this situation. At least not on my system. I admit, I haven't tried it with "hibernate".

What O/S are people having trouble with, XP? I don't even recall having this problem on Win2K when using standby there.

[quote user="jcraigcsu"]

With more and more emphasis being placed on going "green" and saving energy / money, universities such as mine are considering implementing an application that expands the capabilities of MicroSoft’s Standby mode for the monitor and the PC. I think the right terminology here is that Pegasus Mail is a connection-oriented application running on protocol NCP over TCP. Pegasus Mail is NCP file read/write intensive hence lots of data passing through the network. Once the PC enters Standby, the connection is lost and when the PC comes back to life, Pegasus abends. Does anyone have suggestions on how to have the best of both worlds, namely Pegasus Mail and substantial energy savings?

Thank you.

 Jeff

[/quote]

On my laptop, I put the system into standby by closing the lid.  I've gotten in the habit of taking Pegasus Mail offline (Alt-F/L or left-click the little green "C" in the lower-right corner) before closing the lid. Not sure this would work for you as your message implies your system is going into standby on its own rather than as the result of an overt act like closing a laptop lid.

However, I never had an abend, it was just annoying to have Pegasus Mail yappning about being unable to connect.  What version of Windows are you running?