Vanguard,
1. I have no understanding of "UIDL", or its purpose in YPops. But when
I see it in the download status window for YPops, as indicated in your
example at (
http://snipurl.com/bpcq). I have found that there is a
corrupted message that is blocking the download, and I need to go
through Yahoo's webmail, and delete that message. Then downloading
proceeds normally into OE. I receive mail from 4 yahoo accts on my PC,
and my wife receives mail on 2 accts on her laptop connected wirelessly.
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YahooPOPs *emulates* UIDL by using the message-ID from the URL returned
to it when YahooPOPs accesses the page to show that e-mail. The link I
provided was to show the problems when using POP3 to connect to
*Gmail's* POP3 server, not what happens when I connect to Yahoo webmail
using YahooPOPs (it was to show that although I am still trying to find
an alternate and free solution for direct POP3 access that I still ended
up back with YahooPOPs because POP3 access sucks with Gmail). For a
definition of UIDL, see
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1939.html#page-12. It is
possible that the indexing of messages gets changed between when you do
a headers-only mail poll and when you send a later DELE command in a
different mail session to get rid of that message. The result is that
you try to delete a message that no longer has that index (and you get
an -ERR status returned) or you delete the wrong message (because, in
the next mail poll, a different message has the index you recorded for a
message in your prior mail poll).
UIDL means "unique ID listing". It is an ID string that is unique to
that that particular message for the lifetime of your e-mail account
(i.e., no other message in the past or future will have that unique ID
string). This means you can be assured that the action you later
attempt on a message in a different mail session will be against the
correct message you recorded from a prior mail session. You cannot
guarantee that with relative indexing numbers that change as the order
and count of messages change in your mail queue.
Since Yahoo webmail is *not* a POP3 server and won't return status from
any POP3 commands sent to it (it won't respond to any POP3 command),
YahooPOPs needs to emulate a UIDL based on the message ID within the URL
that Yahoo Mail presents for the web page that displays that e-mail
(internal to YahooPOPs). This UIDL emulation is only possible because
Yahoo Mail sticks in a unique identifier in the URL. I believe that you
can see the unique ID that Yahoo assigned to your message and puts into
their URL by turning on advanced logging in YahooPOPs. It will look
like:
http://us.f417.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Sh...52431_2176_1297_223_0_41_-1_0&bodyPart=HEADER
Notice the "MsgId=" parameter in the URL. The unique ID is between the
equals sign ("=") and the next parameter delimiter character ("&"). No
one has monitored if Yahoo Mail always uses a message ID that remains
unique for the life of a freebie Yahoo webmail account but it has been
shown to be unique long enough to accomodate typical POP3-like access
over many days. In version 0.6, it now truncates the very long message
ID strings in the URL down to only 7 numbers which means it is less
likely that message IDs are unique indefinitely, but they should remain
unique for so long enough a time that any recurrence of that value is
unlikely under normal use. Using the emulated (and now truncated)
unique ID from the Yahoo Mail's URL for the message is still far more
safer than relying on the index numbers for your messages not changing
or getting reused between sucessive mail polls. It's like using MD5 to
hash the login credentials. Hashing doesn't guarantee indefinite
uniqueness but it is unique enough over the short span of time over
which that MD5-enabled login handshaking is allowed to complete.
Do you leave your computer powered on 24x7 (so mail polling occurs
repeatedly at the scheduled intervals) and YahooPOPs remains constantly
loaded? How often do you poll (i.e., what is the scheduled interval)?
Regardless of what the authors claim about YahooPOPs capacity as to how
many concurrent e-mail sessions it may open at a time (which they
haven't yet actually load tested on the product so they never pin it
down when asked), I noticed that using YahooPOPs with 12 accounts is
less stable than using it with 4 accounts which is only slightly less
stable than using it to poll 1 Yahoo webmail account but which none of
them are as reliable as going direct to a real POP3 server. I cannot
find the quote right now but somewhere the author has stated that if
Yahoo Mail is important or critical to you then pay for it instead of
trying to use YahooPOPs.
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2. I also is a SPAM filter program called PopFile. It uses Port 110 for
incoming mail, which causes me to have to use Port 123 for YPops, on the
Yahoo Mail acct's Advance tab i still have it set to 110.
<skip setup description>
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I also run a local proxy to perform spam filtering (SpamPal). I always
configure proxies to use ports other than the standard ones for whatever
protocol they support on their listening ports. Although some
anti-virus software runs as an LSP (layered service provider) in your
TCP service, as does EzAntivirus, lots of anti-virus programs run as a
[transparent] proxy. It's transparent if you don't need to change your
e-mail account's settings to have it point at the proxy whereas
non-transparent proxies have you modify the e-mail account to point at
their proxy. Some non-transparent AV proxies may make the change
automatically and is why some users complain about their e-mail settings
getting changed to include 127.0.0.1 in the Account Name field.
Transparent proxies are often not configurable as to which ports they
monitor; for example, if you use non-standard ports then Norton
Antivirus cannot interrogate your e-mail traffic but, I believe, you can
configure Avast! to monitor on non-standard ports. Even if the proxy is
transparent and even if it seems to work with YahooPOPs and/or SpamPal
to share the same port number, I configure the proxies to use different
ports to avoid any current (and possibly hidden) problems and to avoid
any potential conflicts later.
For my configuration, I have (parenthesized values are the port
numbers):
POP3 e-mail client (7110) <--- SpamPal (8110) <-- YahooPOPs (80 or 443)
<-- Yahoo webmail
YahooPOPs uses port 80 to connect to Yahoo webmail if I configure it to
use MD5 hashing of login credentials, or it uses port 443 when using
HTTPS (i.e., SSL over HTTP) if I configure it that way to secure my
login credentials. MD5 and SSL only secure the login credentials
(username and password) and do not encrypt the contents of your e-mail
(you'll have to use a digital certificate if you want to encrypt the
content of your e-mails; otherwise, after the secured login has
completed, all your e-mails get transferred as clear text). In my
e-mail client, I have:
SMTP server = myISPsmtpServer
SMTP port = 465 (SSL enabled)
POP3 server = SpamPal
POP3 port = 7110
Account Name = "myusername@YahooPOPs:8110"
I define "127.0.0.1 SpamPal" and "127.0.0.1 YahooPOPs" in my hosts file
so I can use host *names* instead of the IP address (localhost or
127.0.0.1) to clue me in as to which proxy is actually getting used in
each field in the e-mail account's definition. I have also tried using
just 127.0.0.1 because some users have claimed that sometimes the
resolution from the hosts file will fail. I use my ISP's SMTP server
(via an SSL connect) to send outbound e-mails to avoid the
spam/promotional signature that Yahoo appends to any outbound messages
sent using their freebie account.
Since none of these ports are the standard ones (110 for POP3 and 25 for
SMTP), my anti-virus program's transparent proxy (ccApp.exe for Norton
Antivirus) cannot interrogate that traffic. YahooPOPs occasionally
going brain dead is not due to the AV proxy going unresponsive or
causing timeouts, plus I have also tested with e-mail scanning disabled
in the AV program.
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3. You may still have a timeout problem, if you are polling 2 or more
Yahoo accts, one after the other. If you have other POP3 accts, try
altering the names of the Yahoo accts, so that they are separated from
each other, in the Mail acct tab. It appears that this can be done in
OE6, which seemed "hit or miss", in earlier versions, of OE.
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So is what you are suggesting to *alternate* YahooPOPs-accessed accounts
in OE with real POP3 accounts? I haven't tried that. However, I
eventually pared down my 8 Yahoo accounts down to 4 and now I'm down to
just one Yahoo account. So there would be no way to alternate just one
Yahoo account with other Yahoo accounts by interceding the mail poll to
include a account that accessed a real POP3 server. YahooPOPs will go
unresponsive even when polling one Yahoo webmail account. It doesn't
happen a lot unless you believe going unresponsive about 2 to 4 times
per week to be excessive. If you power cycle your computer between your
uses of it (so YahooPOPs gets loaded anew) then it is far less likely
that you will generate enough traffic or have YahooPOPs allocated
resources often enough within that Windows session to incur the hang-up
problem.
I have worked on several occasions with the authors on trying to resolve
YahooPOPs going unresponsive but nothing in their logs or debug output
has helped. It happens. Once folks start using it a LOT with many
accounts, leaving it up 24x7, using a short poll interval (which should
be longer than 5 minutes to ensure you aren't trying to do the next mail
poll before completing the last one) that ends up with hundreds of mail
polls per day, you'll see them show up in the forums noting that e-mail
went dead until they restarted YahooPOPs.
NOTE: Please stop using quoted-printable format. It screws up replying
to your messages. OE and other e-mail clients won't handle it
correctly. No quote character gets prepended to your lines. While OE
supports sending in quoted-printable format, it can screw up OE when
trying to reply to a message that uses it, and most times whenever I've
experimented with it in other more usenet- or mail-oriented newsgroups I
get lambasted for using quoted-printable because it looks like one huge
long line to some users. That's why I didn't bother adding all the
prefix quote characters when replying to your post (they weren't there
on a reply to your quoted-printable post and I wasn't going to bother to
add all of them). You can still use quoted-printable with e-mail but
just don't use it for newsgroups (Tools -> Options -> Send -> Plain-text
Settings (News sending format)".
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