I was also experiencing this with my Palm Treo 700wx and a few other windows mobile devices. I have applied the beta patch and all has been working without issue for a few days now. Thanks so much David!

 

Hi,

One of our users bought a new PDA (Dopod M700 running Windows Mobile). Het gets an error message while retrieving e-mail via our Merc32 4.51 pop3 server:

    Message could not be downloaded as your POP3 server does not provide a unique identifier for each message

Googled this error message and the posts I found point to the pop3 server that should support unique-ID listing (UIDL). I couldn't find an option in MercuryP that seems related.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Ron
 

Mercury32 does support UIDL. Here is the POP3 HELP response :

   Mercury/32 MTS Post Office Protocol v3 server v4.51,
Copyright (c) 1993-2007 David Harris.
This server recognizes the following commands:
  USER - login as a user
  PASS - specify a password
  APOP - perform secure login
  CAPA - RFC2449 capability discovery
  STLS - Start TLS negotiation, if enabled
  STAT - show mailbox statistics
  RETR - send a message
  LIST - show message numbers and sizes
  DELE - delete a message
  RSET - 'undo' all mailbox changes
  TOP  - show lines from a message
  QUIT - close the connection
  NOOP, RPOP, LAST are also supported.

Extended commands:
  XTND XMIT  - Send a message via POP3
  XTND XLST  - Eudora extended list command
  UIDL - return unique identifier (RFC1725).

And an UIDL command gets this response:

 +OK Welcome! 3 messages (68967 bytes)
uidl
+OK unique IDs follow...
1 66A1DBE.CNM3547CFBF
2 A3C1E04.CNM3547CFBF
3 4DJTZHQ.CNM36BB574E
 

I actually get the same message with my Treo 700wx.  It happens when there is no email in the box.  How I worked around it is I always leave either a read message in the inbox, or leave a message in the deleted folder.

This sounds like being the same problem that has been brought up in the MERCURY List not too long ago:

Mercury/32 erroneously answers UIDL commands with an error message when the mailbox is empty, instad of just delivering an empty list.

Many mail clients (mostly mobile) issue an UIDL command without prior STAT (that would show the box is empty). They then correctly interpret the received error message as the command not being supported and throw an error.

Thanks for the quick replies guys!

So if I understand correctly the error message only appears if there is no new mail present.

If there is new mail present, the PDA should retrieve the mail normally without any errors?

Ron

[quote user="HellasGuy"]

Mercury/32 erroneously answers UIDL commands with an error message when the mailbox is empty, instad of just delivering an empty list.

[/quote]

It is entirely debatable that this is "erroneous". Indeed, Mercury works the way it does because a number of years ago, it was required behaviour for a commonly-used mailer of the time. The RFC is ambiguous at best on this issue, although I personally tend to agree that a NUL list would be the more appropriate response.

In another thread on this subject, I *did* indicate that if I could be certain that changing the behaviour would not break other applications, I would consider doing so, but nobody had anything more to say about that, so I did not proceed.

-- David --

I've prepared a kind of beta patch for this that you can try to see if using NUL lists -

a) fixes your problems
b) doesn't break other applications

You can find it at ftp://ftp.usm.maine.edu/pegasus/mercury32/mp_uidls.zip. The default behaviour is now to use NUL lists instead of issuing the error, but this can be changed using an INIfile setting if necessary. If enough people try it out and report affirmatively, I'll integrate the fix into the full distribution archive and put this out as an official patch. Note that this beta patch will ONLY work with v4.51 - you must not attempt to use it with older versions of Mercury.

Cheers!

-- David --

[quote user="David Harris"]

I've prepared a kind of beta patch for this that you can try to see if using NUL lists -

a) fixes your problems
b) doesn't break other applications

You can find it at ftp://ftp.usm.maine.edu/pegasus/mercury32/mp_uidls.zip. The default behaviour is now to use NUL lists instead of issuing the error, but this can be changed using an INIfile setting if necessary. If enough people try it out and report affirmatively, I'll integrate the fix into the full distribution archive and put this out as an official patch. Note that this beta patch will ONLY work with v4.51 - you must not attempt to use it with older versions of Mercury.

Cheers!

-- David --

[/quote]

Looks like it does what you say.  This should fix the broken PDA POP3 mail clients, wonder whatr else will be broken.  ;-(

+OK <718085578.1815@tstephenson.com>, POP3 server ready.
user thomas
+OK thomas is known here.
pass xxxxxxxx
+OK Welcome! 0 messages (0 bytes)
uidl
+OK unique IDs follow...
.
stat
+OK 0 0

Thanks very much David.  I will install the patch right away and let it run for the weekend. I will post any findings right away.

Ron

Can't wait to take it for a spin when I get home, although it never really bothered me

Running the patched MercuryP without any problems for three days now.  Happy PDA users (no more error messages) and no problems at all with 'normal' e-mail clients!

Thanks again David!

Ron