I saw those suggestions. But the most recent instance of this bug was with a message with only 2 recipients -- definitely not a list of addresses or close to any likely limit on address length.

I am using the latest version of Pegasus Mail,  4.72.572.

I have been in touch with David Harris about this, at his invitation in a message above in this forum thread. He has not seen this bug reported before.

OK, I searched on everything I could think of and scanned a year's messages. Is this gremlin attached to me alone? 

When I try to send an original mail (as opposed to a fwd) to several recipients, they may get something like the stuff below the ***** instead of the material I sent. Attachments don't go through either. I think it's a Pegasus problem because it's been with me through several PC's and OS's -- WinXP through Vista; now running Win7 Ultimate 64 bit-- and through several ISP's from dialup to wireless (and this is about the only Pegasus problem I ever have!).

The max number of addressees before the glitch is invoked seems to be 3. I had the problem years ago too, so it's probably not anything to do with recent upgrades/updates.

The messages I need to send to a number of recipients are  usually something like "Meeting changed to 10 AM Saturday," --text messages with no embedded pictures or (usually) even links, and almost never with attachments. The messages look right in my "Copies to Self" folder. I don't use any unusual parameters -- "copy to self" and "rich text," in the editor;  "Use MIME features..." is checked in the  "special" tab (by default?), but that should have no relevance in a message that's only a paragraph of plain text.

So do I need to change something (CC isn't always a good idea, unfortunately)? Is there a fix? Few of the lines tell me anything but hundreds here are smarter than I about such things. TIA for any suggestions!

--molly

******************   here's what recipients of the latest glitched messages saw  *******************

SU:Comments on (message subject --mm)
EN:0
CS:1
RC:0
DC:0
UR:0
SS:1
SG:-1
MI:1
CE:ISO-8859-1
ID:<Default>
ME:0
MF:0
TX:0
EX:0
AT:G:\Office

Docs\Word Docs (etc, path & filename of attachment --mm)
AT:G:\Office Docs\Word

Docs (etc)
HP:0
ED:1047

521
RT:1
RX:DBPYKQX5.PNX
FL:0
 

I have also gotten a few reports from recipients of similar strange messages.  I haven't identified any pattern to when recipients get these garbled messages, but it seems to be a Pegasus Mail bug. The messages look correct, with the intended message text, in the "sent mail" folder. But the recipients seems to have received only some set of pmail message metadata, not the intended message text or attachment.

FWIW, I'm using pmail version 4.71.565 under wine.

Here's what the latest recipient sent back to me as what they received (with personal info substituted): 

From: "Me" <sender@domain.com>
Organization: My Organization
To: Jane Doe <recipient@recipient.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Oct 2016 19:58:21 -0700
Subject: message subject
CC: copy1 <copy@cc.com>,
copy2  <copy2@cc.com>

EN:0
CS:1
RC:0
DC:0
UR:0
SS:0
SG:7
MI:1
CE:UTF-8
ID:<Default>
ME:0
MF:0
TX:0
EX:0

AT:D:\path\to\attachment\filename.pdf,Unknown,0
HP:0
ED:687 315
RX:9JGRA7ZG.PNX
FL:0

Could WINE be the common denominator for both of you? Molly?

What you're seeing here is the raw form of the message as Pegasus Mail stores it in "queue reloadable" format - that is, it's the format the program uses to allow it to reload the message for further editing or composition. Before the program sends the message out, it converts it from this format to a format called "Final form", which is no longer reloadable (you'll see "Final form" from time to time in your mail queue).

What I don't understand here is how the data could be getting sent out without being converted to final form - if you'd asked me for an opinion, I'd have told you it wasn't possible, although it clearly is.

A couple of things to think about: do you have anti-virus software operating in "real time" mode? This type of thing can interfere with Pegasus Mail's access to its files, leading to strange, unpredictable behaviour. We would normally recommend excluding your mailbox directory from real-time scanning, simply because the A/V packages don't do it very well. Another possibility - do you perhaps have an extension or something else running on your system that might change the extensions on your files? That's the only way I've been able to think of where the data could be sent without being converted to final form - Pegasus Mail works out what's in the files from their extensions, so if the extension of your queued message somehow gets changed, then that might have a bearing on things.

And one last possibility... The line that says "RX:DBPYKQX5.PNX" indicates that there was a richtext form of the message body stored with the draft or queued message as a separate file called "DBPYKQX5.PNX": if this file were deleted or moved somewhere, then Pegasus Mail would no longer be able to find it, and I suppose that might lead to it believing that it should send the raw queued content instead. Could there be something on your system deleting or preventing access to this file?

Off the top of my head, this is what I can think of for now - if none of this helps, mail me offline and I'll try to track it further (I'm sure you have my address).

Cheers!

-- David --

Thank you, David, for your interest and prompt reply. I'm not running any real-time virus scanning software. I'm not running any background process or doing anything that i would expect to alter file extensions. That makes me think it's something within pmail, perhaps a message being sent at just the wrong moment in the process of re-editing and re-queuing a queued outgoing message? I've sent you some more details by e-mail, and would be happy to do whatever i can to assist in debugging. 

David,

Not ignoring you, just got back from 6 months exploring the country I live in (the often beautiful beyond belief USA; NZ next year maybe...) and catching up.

No to all the questions; AVG scans periodically (and the glitch predates my use of it), no constantly running backup program, nothing I know of that would change file extensions or delete or sequester rich text files (wouldn't such things plague me elsewhere?).  That it's happened through so many OS's seems to suggest a "no" here also.

Does the glitch seeming to be related to the number of sendees suggest anything? There's always plenty of memory available (in the system) but could there be some sort of a cache -- temporary storage-- that somehow gets overloaded? Or, what would happen if there'd been a burp in the transmission? Until recently momentary disconnects were pretty common out here in the country. 

 And for Michael, I've run only Windows programs since before the Flying Horse came into my life, so it wouldn't be WINE. I'm currently running Windows 7 on the desktop.

It's a very minor problem for me. I should try sending a test message to all my relatives and see if the glitch is still lurking.

 And thanks.

I'm checking in again because this happened to me again.

Mollym wrote, "Does the glitch seeming to be related to the number of sendees suggest anything?"

I'm not a programmer, so I can't really answer. But it does seem most likely to occur with larger numbers of recipients. In my most recent case, there were 44 recipients. I rarely send messages with such a large number of recipients.

Unfortunately, messages with a lot of receipients tend to be important ones, multiplying the consequences (intended message not received, embarrassment for the sender) of the bug.

In the most recent case, I know that I realized after completing the message, and while it was in the outgoing queue, that I had omitted an intended recipient from the recipient list.

So I opened the queued message (form the "Queue Manager pane), re-edited it to add a BCC: address, and clicked send to replace the queued message with the revised version.

I am not certain, but I think that this may be a common feature of each occurrence of this bug: Many recipients, and re-editing a queued message before it is sent.

Could this bug relate to the way that pmail saves an edited message that has previously been queued as outgoing?

David, I sent you a separate email about this. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help with diagnosis, or if I should re-send it.

Thanks and best regards,

Edward  

I would suggest you create a distribution list to contain all the email addresses you want to send to. I think it unlikely that the To: or CC: parts of a message composition screen can contain this number of entries.

Create a distribution list via Pegasus Mail menu Addresses/Distribution lists and click New List (F6)

HTH

Martin

 A distribution list isn't necessarily the answer as I don't send just every ribald observation to just every person [;)]

When I was the person in charge of getting singers to rehearsal I set up a distribution list for chorus members, usually just four or five altos. Four out of the five would reply with ????? and the more savvy ones backquoted the message. That's why I quit trying with distribution lists.(And that's how I got my hands on the text of the messages--)

That said, this was a while back and the distribution list problem may have been fixed in subsequent versions of PMail.

Silly question: how many characters are in the To: list? Seen above only 44 mail addresses, but wonder if the total number of characters is greater than the limit allowed for the addressing? Think it was about 1024 or a bit less.

i.e.: John Doe <reallyoddemail@joolygoodemilservice.com>  vs john.doe@gmail.com now repeat for say 2/3rds of the email addresses.

 Could be way off base just a thought. 

The only silly question is the one you don't ask (forget who I'm quoting...)

 There wouldn't be any 1024 characters in any set of correspondents I'd send anything to but it wouldn't surprise me at all if the glitch is related to the number of characters or maybe something about the aliases? Thanks for the thought.

 (re: someone else's suggestion that editing the list could set off the glitch, PMail's autofill is so good that I don't remember ever having to edit a list but that's another interesting thought.)

I wonder if I have enough patient friends to send test messages to.

[8-|] 

This has happened to me again. (It may have happened more often, but I only know about it when a recipient sends me back a coy of the garbage message they received).

The copy of my outgoing message in my sent mail folder looks normal. There were only 2 recipients, whihc were spelled out, not called fporm a list.

The recipient sent me the following:

I received a message, but I don't think the text came through correctly

Best,

-----Original Message-----
From: Edward Hasbrouck [mailto:edward@hasbrouck.org]
Sent: Saturday, January 13, 2018 1:32 PM
To: [RECIPIENT 1 NAME REDACTED] <name1@domain.tld>
Cc: [RECIPIENT 2 NAME REDACTED] <name2@domain.tld>
Subject: [SUBJECT REDACTED]

EN:0
CS:1
RC:0
DC:0
UR:0
SS:0
SG:7
MI:1
CE:UTF-8
ID:<Default>
8H:In-reply-to: <E95B2E11273A9740BBE6731102DFD1E22B9C3B1E@D2ASEPREA021>
8H:References: <E95B2E11273A9740BBE6731102DFD1E22B9C3B1E@D2ASEPREA021>
ME:0
MF:0
TX:0
EX:0
HP:0
ED:805 478
RX:2VQU9VOE.PNX
FL:0


 

Ed,

There were some suggestions that might have been useful for another person back a ways in this thread. Basically that the addresses in a list exceeded the number of characters allowed, either because there were too many addresses or too many recipients had fancied up their aliases lengthily. This didn't apply to any of the lists I had used, and it had happened when I sent a message to more than perhaps 3 people. As you say, you only know when you get feedback.

I haven't had the problem recently, but I'm not in charge of any group mailings at the moment and don't find any recent messages with more than a couple of addresses. Or it may be that my current version -- 4.72.572 -- has unglitched the glitch.

Thanks for taking the trouble to post -- never underestimate the power of an old thread!

 molly