[quote user="David Obdrzalek"]Why IERenderer makes Pegasus freeze even without displaying any email (instead of properly reporting a problem)?[/quote]

First of all the IER extension needs to load an invisible instance of the renderer to work around a bug M$ doesn't want to fix since Pegasus Mail most probably isn't "big" enough for them to care (IIRC it would disable pasting copied content from a renderer window after closing all instances of IE on your system - I guess this removes the HTML handler from the clipboard chain). Why there's an issue on WINE is beyond my knowledge, it's most probably some unimplemented IE related call. After talking to the WINE guys they told me I shouldn't try to work around this (even not disable IER completely if detecting the WINE environment provided I could do so at all) since it's supposed to be fixed by them. IIRC they worked on it for a while, apparently without success. And: Handling WINE issues without having a debug environment for doing so is rather difficult, at least for me ...

 TER and IMAP issues can only be discussed with David Harris.

Hi folks,

I'm a fossil user of Pegasus since '94 and maybe longer. I still love to use it. Now it happened to me to switch to Linux and I managed to nearly well bring Pegasus with me under Wine. It is mostly working as usual (i.e. well and as I need it) but time to time it crashed. I tried to locate the problem; to make the story short, here is a generic email which makes my installation of Pegasus always crash when opening the email from an IMAP account:

Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2015 19:00:00 +0100 (CET)
From: david.obdrzalek@email.cz
To: david.obdrzalek@email.cz
Subject:  crash
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html;charset=utf-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

A<img src=3D"http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02220/wine1_2220880b.jpg">

Automatic picture download is disabled, IERenderer not used. Without the "A", the email is OK, without the src attribute inside the img tag the email is OK. No matter on charset or encoding. Multipart email is OK. Curiously, if the mail is copied to a local folder, no problem. If it is in an IMAP folder on a server, 100% crash.

The same email is OK on Windows, KO on Linux+Wine (I even checked out and compiled the latest 1.7.54 and it is the same). The dump says it crashed somewhere in ter32.dll:

Unhandled exception: page fault on read access to 0x00000000 in 32-bit code (0x25961fb9).
Register dump:
 CS:0073 SS:007b DS:007b ES:007b FS:0033 GS:003b
 EIP:25961fb9 ESP:00327024 EBP:0032703c EFLAGS:00010246(  R- --  I  Z- -P- )
 EAX:00000000 EBX:00000001 ECX:00000000 EDX:00000000
 ESI:00d58028 EDI:00d6dfc0
Stack dump:
0x00327024:  00000001 00000000 00d58028 00d5cd61
0x00327034:  00000001 00000000 00327054 259e5324
0x00327044:  00d58028 00000001 00d58028 0000000d
0x00327054:  00327088 259e7a4a 00d58028 00000000
0x00327064:  00000000 0033b14c 00d58028 00000000
0x00327074:  259e0637 00000009 00000000 00000009
Backtrace:
=>0 0x25961fb9 in ter32 (+0x121fb9) (0x0032703c)
  1 0x259e5324 in ter32 (+0x1a5323) (0x00327054)
  2 0x259e7a4a in ter32 (+0x1a7a49) (0x00327088)
0x25961fb9: movzwl    0x0(%eax),%edi

I also tried the current version of ter32.dll (evaluation download from Sub Systems, Inc.) which does not crash. But unfortunately does not provide good result either - texts in html emails are "squeezed" to a single letter width...

It is quite possible it is not Pegasus problem, maybe BearHtml, maybe TE Edit, maybe Wine (some not-yet-implemented feature in Wine is probably the root, but it looks someone is not testing the result of a library call and dereferences a null pointer - which is a fault of the caller, not the library).

But I have run out of ideas how to trace it further on. Any clue what to do now?

[quote user="David Obdrzalek"]But I have run out of ideas how to trace it further on. Any clue what to do now? [/quote]

David Harris uses a customized version of the TER library, and he's working on IMAP (among other stuff) ever since 4.70 was released (or even earlier). WINE issues are, of course, to be handled by the WINE authors, they don't even want us to work around any such issues even if possible (I once discussed a IERenderer issue with them). I would suggest to contact David Harris directly (see the History of Pegasus Mail in its help file).

I suggest you try installing either Bearhtml.dll or IERenderer to do the html decoding and rendering. TER is famous for tripping over things.

Martin

IERendered needs to be disabled for Pegasus to work on Linux+Wine, it does not work there at all, afaiui (well, tried anyway and Pegasus hangs while starting; no surprise as Wine and IE don"t get together...)

I thought Bearhtml comes already with Pegasus. I updated Bearhtml to 4.8.1 as per http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/44672.aspx, unfortunately to no avail.

[quote user="idw"]

[quote user="David Obdrzalek"]But I have run out of ideas how to trace it further on. Any clue what to do now? [/quote]

David Harris uses a customized version of the TER library, and he's working on IMAP (among other stuff) ever since 4.70 was released (or even earlier). WINE issues are, of course, to be handled by the WINE authors, they don't even want us to work around any such issues even if possible (I once discussed a IERenderer issue with them). I would suggest to contact David Harris directly (see the History of Pegasus Mail in its help file).

[/quote]

The strangest thing is that the same data makes Pegasus crash for IMAP-homed email and no crash for an email stored locally. So it crashes only in certain conditions. That sounds like something in relation to networking or temporary file storage and I can easily imagine some kind of race conditions being in charge of the problem (e.g. manipulation with a file sooner than the data is flushed so it is not really available yet although the write call returned - or so). After all, that does not look like a bug in Wine, more likely it is either a problem in the Pegasus application (or its 3rd party libraries) maybe also in combination with something not yet implemented in Wine.

The crash behaviour tells TER dereferences a null pointer. I believe

that pointer came somehow from a system call, which was handled by Wine

and 0 was returned (*) while genuine Windows

return a valid pointer in that situation. Obviously, TER developers did

not test data returning from system calls which is the precise cause of

the crash. This was clearly their problem, but it has changed in later version (TER v 2.3 in my case). It does not crash any more but at the same time new TER produces unreadable html output. That is another problem and this new issue looks like a consequence of an unimplemented feature in Wine (at least new TER calls GetCharacterPlacementW

asking for caret positions which is unimplemented and Wine knows it, while the old version did not). That can be solved in Wine, either waiting enough for the developers to implement it by time, or, as Wine source code is available,  someone more fluent in Windows

internals might be able to implement it and propose to include it to

Wine as anyone else. But I don't know at first what is missing and at

second how that should be implemented.

(*) The reason Wine returned 0 for something might be either something not yet implemented, or a proper behaviour in case of something like the race conditions I mentioned earlier.

 I'll try to contact David, thanks for idea. I would be honoured if I could meaningfully contribute to v5 :-)

[quote user="David Obdrzalek"] I'll try to contact David, thanks for idea. I would be honoured if I could meaningfully contribute to v5 :-)[/quote]

Thanks and good success!

In the hopes of bringing some light onto this problem, I would appreciate you sending me a copy of one of the messages, in its entirety, to my email address, irelam@telus.net

I want to compare the message output from TER against the output from my Bearhtml   Thank you

Martin

Just did (it is exactly the contents of the box in my first post). The important point is to open it from IMAP, not local folder. I'm really curious of your result.

Are there any other linux / Wine users here around?

Now! I didn't have any time for some days but tonight I think I've brought it to life! 

It appears I have disabled IERenderer a little bit too much. It must be installed and present for BearHTML to work, otherwise TER is used which makes Pegasus crash. And IERenderer must not be run, otherwise it makes Pegasus freeze. Dancing on a minefield...

I'll recheck to confirm and write a report.

[quote user="David Obdrzalek"]I'll recheck to confirm and write a report. [/quote]

It is possible to use BearHtml without having IERenderer installed at all, but it isn't usually necessary as you see, it's enough to just disable its rendering (via its menu) for having BearHtml to work. And, BTW, IERenderer comes with its own installer, so using this one to uninstall should remove it without doing any harm to the rest of Pegasus Mail ...

[quote user="idw"]It is possible to use BearHtml without having IERenderer installed at all,[/quote]

Is it? How?I thought BearHTML gets used when there is the UseBearHTML = YES settings item in IERenderer.ini config file.

Anyway, IERenderer is installed automatically with Pegasus as well as BearHtml. Both are in versions available when Pegasus was published (valid at least for 4.7, I didn't try older version).

[quote user="idw"] but it isn't usually necessary as you see, it's enough to just disable its rendering (via its menu) for having BearHtml to work.

That cannot be done, Pegasus freezes while loading (starting)

IERenderer (either if the IERenderer.fff flags are set to load it at

startup, as well as if it is not set and the user launches is via menu

Tools/Extensions/IERenderer). So one cannot use its menu. I tried the version coming with Pegasus and 2.4.9.9 and they both hang.

[quote user="idw"] And, BTW, IERenderer comes with its own installer, so using this one to uninstall should remove it without doing any harm to the rest of Pegasus Mail ...
[/quote]

 How to uninstall it if it was installed as part of Pegasus installation?

[quote user="David Obdrzalek"] How to uninstall it if it was installed as part of Pegasus installation?[/quote]

It uses its own installer (which is called by Pegasus Mail's installer) and is registered where all other application (un)installers are registered in Windows (since I'm using a German version I can't tell the exact location name). No idea whether or how this is handled on WINE. The uninstall entry is called Pegasus Mail HTML Renderer x.x.x.x..

[quote user="idw"]

It uses its own installer (which is called by Pegasus Mail's installer) and is registered where all other application (un)installers are registered in Windows (since I'm using a German version I can't tell the exact location name). No idea whether or how this is handled on WINE. The uninstall entry is called Pegasus Mail HTML Renderer x.x.x.x..
[/quote]

I see. Unfortunately I have no clue where (if) something like "Unisintall a program" is in Wine.

When launched from Pegasus installer, IERenderer does not create the uninstall entry in the Start menu so it has probably to be deleted manually, if needed. Or, upgrading and then uninstalling as the menu item may be created when launching the installer manually. Or left there sleeping and not caring about it.

Got it now [:)]

Or, running "wine uninstaller" which is the correct "uninstall a program" way in Wine...

Hi all,

I spent some time testing and I think I can report victory [:D]

What was wrong in my case:

In my installation of Pegasus 4.70, I followed the hint on WineHQ for Pegasus which suggested:

After install, disable IERenderer by adding this line to all users IERenderer.ini:
UseBearHtml=YES
Another possible workaround is renaming or deleting the file IERenderer.fff and the directory IERenderer.

I did the first one, it was not enough, Pegasus froze right during the start. So I did the latter one too and it worked for some time. But if this is done, BearHTML is not used even if present and TER is used (regardless on UseBearHTML= setting). And TER crashes under certain conditions.

What should have been done:

Either setting UseBearHtml=YES plus setting the IERenderer not to be launched (setting Form flags = 2 in IERenderer.fff),

or uninstalling IERenderer by proper uninstall process (run  'wine uninstaller', select the Renderer and let it uninstall).

Either way, Pegasus uses BearHTML, does not freeze and does not crash.

Observations:

If IERenderer is installed but its files are not present (are renamed or moved), Pegasus uses TER and BearHTML does not get the chance.

If IERenderer is launched under Linux/Wine, it causes Pegasus to freeze. No need to display an email, just initializing is enough.

If Pegasus calls TER to display a html-only email from IMAP forder, TER crashes.

I wrote a detailed instructions how to install Pegasus in Wine which I'll post separately.

What remains unsolved:

Why IERenderer makes Pegasus freeze even without displaying any email (instead of properly reporting a problem)?

Why TER crashes on displaying a html-only email from IMAP folder (and does not crash if the mail is local)?