Since I would like IERenderer to be available to newer users but not the ancient ones, un-installing is not a good option as that would kill it for everyone.  What would help me the most would in the simplest case be a way make the default option to be not used for first time users of Pmail 4.62.  At least that way it could be enabled for those who have the wherewithal to run it without problems and left disabled for those using the old stuff.  In the perfect world, or at least that which would work for our company the way we are running now, the ideal option would be a way to globally allow or disallow use of IERenderer based on which underlying version of Windows is running. I see hints of a way to do this in regards to your unpublished version.

I did do a lot more testing this morning to try to get more information.  I wiped the current install and started over from scratch just to be sure.  Whatever was graying out the configure option for IERenderer is not doing so now.  I could swear that I did everything the same, however that problem is not occurring any more so that one is a moot point.  All the testing I did this morning was done with WinXPSP3.  In the case of a workstation with the default browser set to something other than IE and with IE's proxy settings set to something invalid and the default browser set to the proper proxy settings, navigating around in an email with lots of lazy html will still cause something, presumable IERenderer or possibly parts or IE to attempt to contact whois.iana.org:nicname directly as well as some web sites by IP address which will in this situation time out and fail.  Pmail is pretty much hung during this timeout, but eventually displays a dialog about "An error occurred while attempting to verify the file type of .....".  This will be the case for a large number of old workstations in our situation, giving rise to the need to control the defaults on first run. 

I will send a private email to the address you suggested if you are still interested in testing on the setup that this is happening on.

Gus

Over the weekend I tried to update a network shared copy of Pmail 4.61 to 4.62 and ran into a few problems.  The shared copy is installed into a folder that is map rooted to a drive (Z:) that ends up in every users path via the login script.  Everyone's email shortcut points at that location, and has for years.  The first noted problem is that the installer does not like to install to the root directory and blindly changes without any warning to install into a folder it creates named "Z:\Programs\" even though I selected the install path as "Z:\".  That one is easy enough to get around in at least a couple of ways, however I make the point that the installer is not being real friendly here in hopes that it can be improved in future versions.  The real show stopper that forces me to go back to 4.61 is that if I open WinPmail (4.62) and click on "Help" and then "Specific help F1"  Pmail crashes instantly.  This happens on both W2k and XP clients.  It does appear to work as long as you stay away from Help.  Suggestions to resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated.

One other point that comes to mind now that it appears that the newer version seems to want to use Ierenderer to deal with all the GUI email we seem to be getting from everywhere is how do I force those users who are still using W2K, and we still have a lot of them, to use the BearHtml renderer instead?  A related question is how to force the Ierenderer to not download lazy HTML?  It appears in the case of several test emails that I tried 4.62 on that it is very slow to load the remote images, or at least it seemed to be on the ones I tried.  The message does not even start to display until the remote image download times out.  The same message opens almost instantly in Thunderbird, however that is set to not download the lazy Html.

Gus 

[quote user="Gusg"]The first noted problem is that the installer does not like to install to the root directory and blindly changes without any warning to install into a folder it creates named "Z:\Programs\" even though I selected the install path as "Z:\".[/quote]

This is very unlikely to change, but only David Harris can properly comment on this.

[quote user="Gusg"]The real show stopper that forces me to go back to 4.61 is that if I open WinPmail (4.62) and click on "Help" and then "Specific help F1"  Pmail crashes instantly.  This happens on both W2k and XP clients.  It does appear to work as long as you stay away from Help.  Suggestions to resolve this issue would be greatly appreciated.[/quote]

Since you seem to be the only one reporting this

(AFAIK)

I'm afraid you've got to make suggestions about what might be going wrong, specifically since nothing has been changed with invoking the help system in 4.62. Did you switch to a localized version (non-English, that is) by any chance? PS: For reporting crashes please install the MiniDump extension (its ReadMe file provides details).

[quote user="Gusg"]One other point that comes to mind now that it appears that the newer version seems to want to use Ierenderer to deal with all the GUI email we seem to be getting from everywhere is how do I force those users who are still using W2K, and we still have a lot of them, to use the BearHtml renderer instead?[/quote]

Why would this be necessary? If you encounter issues with IE 6 (on some systems people get 404 errors) please install the latest IERenderer update. Although IERenderer allows you to provide global option settings you can't currently prevent users from switching back (this feature wasn't intended to be used for switching renderers): Like IERenderer's online help explains you may provide an IERenderer.ini file in the IERenderer subdirectory containing UseBearHtml=YES which will apply to all users. If you want to apply this to certain client machines only you'll need to place the ini-file into the respective machines' AppData directory (on XP typically C:\Documents and Settings\[Username]\Application Data\), please read the Option settings section of IERenderer's help file for details.

[quote user="Gusg"]A related question is how to force the Ierenderer to not download lazy HTML?  It appears in the case of several test emails that I tried 4.62 on that it is very slow to load the remote images, or at least it seemed to be on the ones I tried.  The message does not even start to display until the remote image download times out.  The same message opens almost instantly in Thunderbird, however that is set to not download the lazy Html.[/quote]

A timeout isn't the same as a download: Download's are handled by (almost) the same code being used by BearHtml. To prevent Pegasus Mail from automatically loading remote images go to Pegasus Mail's Tools => Options => Message reader page (at the bottom).

I will try to find time to do the MiniDump in the next couple of days and respond here.

As to IE on Win2K machines, we have blocked users access to IE on those old machines and force them to use Firefox, at least it can be kept current on W2K.  I don't want to run around to all those old computers and make changes to give them access to IE.  If I have to, I will have to set up something in the login script that forces the W2K users to stay with the older version.  I was hoping for an easy way to keep everyone on the same version.  Where I have seen the slow loading situation, it was most likely caused by testing on a box where the IE proxy settings were not configured so it did time out as IE on that box doesn't know how to access the internet.

[quote user="Gusg"]I don't want to run around to all those old computers and make changes to give them access to IE.[/quote]

I don't think I understand: Using IERenderer does not require giving users access to IE, it simply uses IE's libraries (such as ieframe, shdocvw, mshtml etc.), which should be installed on every Windows system unless you've completely uninstalled IE, but even then I doubt they don't exist since other applications use them as well. And IERenderer implements lots of special restrictions to prevent it from directly accessing the Internet. Aside from this you can easily uninstall IERenderer via Control Panel's application management if you don't want to use it (if you need to do it manually just rename or remove Renderer.pm from Pegasus Mail's program directory: Although Pegasus Mail will still load IERenderer.dll it will not use it for rendering anymore).

BTW: I can disable the IERenderer menu entry for switching renderers in another update if you'd like this option to be  disabled via a higher level ini-file.

More info ....
  The help crash was something stupid I did when installing, its fixed now and we will just leave that one at that point.

When I first launch PM4.62 I get a dialog box titled Stop with the message "Unable to locate a Bearmtml.ini file".  I believe that was probably a typo noting the spelling, that exact string exists within bearhtml.dll, which is version 4.6.6.9.  The file bearhtml.ini does exist in the same folder as WinPmail and has a date back in 08.  If I click OK, WinPmail proceeds to load and so far all appears normal.

 If I attempt to open an email that is loaded with GUI stuff (forwarded from another account, I have been using this same email to test all along) the viewer window opens and there is a long delay.  Finally a dialog box titled "IERenderer 2.4.5.18" appears with Yes, No choices about do you want to cancel downloading.  If the user does nothing or selects No, the dialog closes and Pmail is now hard hung and will eventually end up with a blank screen.  If I wait long enough (many many minutes) the message will eventually render without the remote image and pmail is functional again.  If I watch what this computer is trying to do network wise while this is happening, I see that it is attempting to directly access things on the internet.  This computer and all others on our network can access the internet only through a proxy, and IE is set up and accesses the proxy properly on this computer.  It appears that IERenderer is not using the system proxy settings. 

Related info.  Once this version of Pmail has run, a file IERenderer.ini is created in the same folder as the users mailbox.  It appears to be direct copy of the bearhtml.ini that exists in the same folder as the Pmail exe, same date, only the name has changed.  If I open this file with a text editor, I see a commented line that begins with proxyserver.  I have tried uncommenting that line and making the proxy info correct, however it still behaves the same.

My spin on what I see is that IERenderer seems unable to connect through a proxy, or if it can, It has not been obvious how to do so to me.  My opinion for what its worth, would be that it should use the system proxy settings.  The Pmail options under Message reader for Display remote-linked graphis in messages is set to Manually, however it appears that IERenderer is ignoring this setting.  

These tests were run on a clean install of Windows XPsp3 fully patched and a clean install of Win7-32 sp1 fully patched.  Behavior was essentially the same on both.  As to wanting to keep IERenderer out of the hands of the W2K users, I look at it this way, IE6 is now about 10 years old and the libraries have not been updated for some time now either.  Based on past problems with vulnerabilities and IE and these facts, I am very reluctant to let common users have access to it.  Our common image of W2K that has propagated around the company has had users rights to iexplore.exe taken away and the proxy settings have been set to direct and rights to change those taken away from users also.  If we could insure that it never made an attempt to access content from the internet based on some central setting that users can not change, I may think differently.  In any case, the proxy problem eliminates its use on even newer operating systems at this point.  

I did not see anything in the Pmail menus about changing the renderer, I must be missing something. 

[quote user="Gusg"]If I attempt to open an email that is loaded with GUI stuff (forwarded from another account, I have been using this same email to test all along) the viewer window opens and there is a long delay.  Finally a dialog box titled "IERenderer 2.4.5.18" appears with Yes, No choices about do you want to cancel downloading.  If the user does nothing or selects No, the dialog closes and Pmail is now hard hung and will eventually end up with a blank screen.  If I wait long enough (many many minutes) the message will eventually render without the remote image and pmail is functional again.  If I watch what this computer is trying to do network wise while this is happening, I see that it is attempting to directly access things on the internet.  This computer and all others on our network can access the internet only through a proxy, and IE is set up and accesses the proxy properly on this computer.  It appears that IERenderer is not using the system proxy settings.[/quote]

First of all: It doesn't hang, it continues to try downloads (according to your description), and while it's trying to download images you can simply press the <Esc> key to cancel this even after the cancel dialog appeared (which is explained in the dialog!). And with regard to proxy settings (unless you messed with the Pegasus Mail installation in some unknown way): IERenderer puts a button on Pegasus Mail's toolbar (see screenshot below) offering you several options, amongst them Configure, which allows you to modify all relevant settings in IERenderer.ini without any need to use a text editor. This dialog offers an option to enable a proxy (either IE's default or a manually entered address). To learn more about IERenderer you may also use the Show help entry in the button menu which contains the details you need to know for configuring IERenderer.

[quote user="Gusg"]The Pmail options under Message reader for Display remote-linked graphis in messages is set to Manually, however it appears that IERenderer is ignoring this setting.[/quote]

Wrong, it gets the respective information about loading remote images from Pegasus Mail and sticks to it, if it doesn't work this way on your machines there's something going wrong which nobody else encountered before: IERenderer has been publicly tested for more than a year at least, and you can rest assured that people would have complained a lot if it didn't work this way.

Ok terminology, to the average office user, the description would be hang, but whatever.  I realize that clicking yes on the dialog or pressing escape will stop the attempt to download, however if I roll this out the way it is, I will spend the next two months trying to explain this to office staff one at a time.  As to the configure button, I missed that.  I am primarily a menu sort of guy so that one went right past me.  Trying it now, the configure option and several others are greyed out.  Suggestions as to resolve the greyed out situation needed please.  The test user has full rights to the folder Pmail is installed in as well as its own mailbox folder and is logged into Windows as an administrator.  This is just a test situation, the real users will not have write, modify or erase rights to the folder Pmail is installed in and will be logged into Windows as restricted users. In any case, I do need a way to force set these options for all users before rolling it out otherwise I will be setting myself up for a very time consuming trip around a large set of buildings.

As to the the information about loading remote images, I am just reporting what I see.  One thing to consider as a possibility, the installer never has and never will run on any of the machines that will be running Pmail.  This is a shared copy.  I do try to test with everything set as closely as it will be to the final run situation.  We have been installing and running Pmail this way from this same folder since the DOS days, and that comment should give away my age.  I believe that pmailnds.exe is still in the same folder, although I should probably delete it as no one should be using it anymore.  This problem is new to this version of WinPmail.  I had not looked at the IERenderer addon until it was installed with Pmail on this latest install.  It would be nice to have for those users with newer versions of Windows, however for reasons previously stated, I need to keep it off for the older stuff.

As to hidden issues surfacing in long tested code, if you haven't seen this happen yet, let me clue you, it does happen even to code that has run for years without complaints.  The voice of experience speaks here.

[quote user="Gusg"]Ok terminology, to the average office user, the description would be hang, but whatever.[/quote]

Pegasus Mail's status bar tells you about what's going on while it appears to hang (it provides a numeric download processing code, which is only for diagnostic puposes, of course).

[quote user="Gusg"]Trying it now, the configure option and several others are greyed out.  Suggestions as to resolve the greyed out situation needed please.[/quote]

I have no idea, if it doesn't look like my screenshot (only some options disabled, the ones at the bottom enabled) this indicates that IERenderer isn't loaded properly for reasons only you can figure out. I really wonder why it works at all, since in such cases it should fall back to using BearHtml.

[quote user="Gusg"]This is a shared copy.  I do try to test with everything set as closely as it will be to the final run situation.[/quote]

This shouldn't matter, but it clearly looks like your environment isn't prepared for using IERenderer in some kind. I can currently only suggest to uninstall IERenderer, and about disabling it on certain machines I told you further up the thread how to do it (I've modified the code now so users cannot easily change it via button menu anymore, but if they figure out

how to access

the local (override) ini-file they would be able to change it nevertheless).

[quote user="Gusg"]I had not looked at the IERenderer addon until it was installed with Pmail on this latest install.  It would be nice to have for those users with newer versions of Windows, however for reasons previously stated, I need to keep it off for the older stuff.[/quote]

Gus, if you're willing to go through these hassles I can offer to enter "debgging mode", i.e. I would be willing to create some logging versions to figure out what's actually going on at your site - but this will certainly require a relevant part of your (time etc.) resources, and I cannot make any promises about being able to solve these issues ...

Thanks for the offer.  I can do so, however may take some time to do.  This has to happen between projects that actually make us money.  I do have a way I can give you direct access to the test system over the internet without exposing my whole network, however not sure how I can give you the information necessary without posting it here for the whole world to see.  In any case, I need to either resolve the issues or globally disable IERenderer before I can roll out 4.62.

Gus

[quote user="Gusg"]I do have a way I can give you direct access to the test system over the internet without exposing my whole network, however not sure how I can give you the information necessary without posting it here for the whole world to see.  In any case, I need to either resolve the issues or globally disable IERenderer before I can roll out 4.62.[/quote]

IERenderer's button menu provides an About ... dialog containing a link providing my email address, and BearHlpIE-En.htm (the help and resources file) in Pegasus Mail's IERenderer subdirectory contains it as well. Plus, if using PGP (or GnuPG) you can even encrypt it, the key can be imported from a keyserver.

And instead of disabling IERenderer you can simply uninstall it, Pegasus Mail's setup executes a separate IERenderer installer which creates an uninstall entry in Control Panel's application manager. Otherwise you'd need to install my not yet published latest version which allows you to permanently disable it via a server-side IERenderer.ini. 

PS: You can also use S/MIME for encryption, my certificate is "delivered" with the IERenderer.dll and can be imported into your system's certificate store for using its public key.