David E. Ross wrote:
I was getting this with very large messages, actually messages with large attachments. I set a preference under [Account Settings > Disk Space] for my E-mail account to hold messages greater than 75 KB on the server. If I did not download the entire message after some elapsed time, my ISP's mail server would send another copy of the first 75 KB.
That's actually part of the POP protocol. When you download messages, the signal to delete messages from the server isn't sent until the entire batch of messages in the inbox on the server. Thus, if the download gets interrupted, then the effect can be that messages that are a partial batch aren't deleted, and will get downloaded again, on a subsequent attempt.
This kind of effect isn't common for broadband connections, but in the era of dialup connections, it did happen occasionally, especially on slow/unreliable connections. The most common occurrence I would see would be a batch of several hundred KB to download that included one message with a relatively large attachment (typically with photos). If the download would abort (usually timeout), it tended to be while it was downloading the large message. And a subsequent download attempt would re-download the beginning of the batch (already seen), and hang again on the large message. I learned to call this situation a "hairball". (Gag! Ack! Barf! Thwpth!)
I should note that the old Eudora client was an exception, in that it would send a server delete request following successful download of each message, rather than waiting until completion of the entire batch.
The solution is to open the truncated message and download the entire message. Alternatively, you might be able to view the E-mail server over the Web and delete the offending message.
If you see this condition only once, yes, making an IMAP connection to the server (either by setting up an IMAP connection in your mail client, or by going to webmail access, which is also IMAP) will allow you to move both the messages you've seen, and the problem message out of the inbox (whether to trash, or just to some other folder) so that the top of the inbox becomes messages that you haven't yet tried to download.
However, I do concur with the advice that restarting in Safe Mode is a useful thing, as that will indicate whether the problem may be either with an extension, or some other personal preference setting that may be sufficiently amiss that it's interfering with download.
Smith _______________________________________________ support-seamonkey mailing list support-seamonkey@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-seamonkey
