At 04:39 PM 5/26/2005, Clifton Royston wrote:
On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 02:45:25PM -0500, Netlink Tech wrote:
> I know this has been discussed before, but I still have not found a way to
> remedy this problem.
> Users on slow connections with large/lots of messages end up having
> problems retrieving their messages. The following entry is logged.
As stated in all the previous discussions, this indicates a problem
with the client causing the client to disconnect. It has to be fixed
at the *client* side.
Your comment "slow connections with large/lots of messages" points to
the client timing out and disconnecting, for which you'll need to
change timeouts in the client. Outlook and Outlook Express are indeed
notorious culprits.
Indeed, I think we should change the message that qpopper emits to say "It
appears the client disconnected the TCP session."
...
> The server does not appear to have performance problems because of popper,
> but users that get these errors get frustrated. Sometimes they can wait a
> few minutes and retry and it works...sometimes we have to remove large
> messages from their mailbox.
Again, this last points strongly to the client failing to handle the
messages. (I've seen cases of large messages or normal-sized messages
with odd MIME structure which would crash or stall Outlook Express
everytime it tried to read them, and just had to be deleted before the
user could retrieve mail again.)
I'd also encourage checking of antivirus package presence. Most of the AV
packages insert themselves as proxies and try to run the POP session
themselves. In the course of things, they manage to work really badly. It's
really too bad, too, as apparently the mail client programs all have API
interfaces into which the AV programs could plug. Doing so would permit the
mail client to handle the POP and SMTP protocols (including encryption,
etc.) and let the AV folks do virus scanning. Why not have each do what it
was designed for?
