Copenhagen's WIN - Technical Issues FAQs

[Copenhagen]

Are you having problems with a new ISP that requires authentication or has your ISP now made authentication a requirement?

Authentication was first available with Eudora 4.3.2.

If you have a version of Eudora prior to Eudora 4.3.2. the program simply did not have the ability to authenticate and cannot be made to do so with any form of workaround.

You will need to upgrade to a newer version of Eudora if your version of Eudora does not have these checkboxes - see image below:

[Copenhagen]

New "unofficial" advice from "The Eudora Team" about mailbox size issues and compacting.

This advice refers to ALL versions of Eudora.

The existing knowledgebase answercards on these topics are being reviewed and may be updated to better reflect this advice. FAQs on these forums will also soon be changed to reflect this new advice.

Mailbox size in general and In, Out and Trash mailbox size in particular:

Prior to Eudora 6.2, having more than 32767 messages in a mailbox would cause Eudora to rebuild the TOC every time the mailbox was opened. For Eudora 6.2 and later, the number of officially supported messages in a mailbox is 65535, although in theory Eudora should correctly handle more messages than that.

Practically speaking, keeping less than 30 or 40 thousand messages is preferred for performance issues (e.g. sorting a mailbox). As far as TOC corruption goes, more messages make it more likely that you would notice it if messages were lost.

Eudora 7 has a changed behaviour relative to this - it will no longer ask the user before rebuilding a TOC (setting to turn prompting back on is <x-Eudora-option:BotherOnTocRebuild>).

While the In, Out, and Trash mailboxes are special in some ways (e.g. their TOCs are always kept in memory regardless of whether or not the user currently has them open in a window), the advice remains basically the same but it's reasonable advice to keep them somewhat smaller.

Users could notice issues with a larger mailbox and older and slower systems when sorting and searching prior to Eudora 7's indexed search. In and Out in particular are also places where a user is more likely to notice if a problem occurs.

Mailbox physical size is not an issue. Eudora loads messages based on the offsets stored in the TOC, so the total physical size of the mailbox isn't an issue.

Compacting:

For most mailboxes, compacting occasionally doesn't hurt. In fact, if a TOC later needs to be rebuilt, then having previously compacted can make the result of recovery less painful, because less messages that you intentionally transferred or deleted will reappear.

Compacting obsessively is unnecessary and could be potentially harmful.

Keep in mind that what compacting does is get rid of any messages in the mailbox that are not listed in the TOC. If something bad happened to the TOC that Eudora didn't notice (and Eudora checks obsessively for problems with the TOC, so Eudora does and should notice TOC damage) and the user didn't notice messages were missing, compacting would "finalize" the fact that the messages are gone by removing them from the mailbox. If the user noticed the problem before compacting, tech support could advise the user to back up the files, rename a copy of the mailbox (without renaming the TOC), and let Eudora generate a new TOC recovering all deleted messages.

Compacting can be both good and bad. Not a bad idea to do occasionally, but it would be ok to just let Eudora do it when it decides there's "enough" wasted space in the mailbox. The current default [CompactMailbox%=25] value is considered reasonable.

Wasted space in the mailbox doesn't really affect Eudora. It wastes the user's disk space, but disk space is less of an issue for most people these days. If the TOC gets corrupted, more messages will be resurrected if the value is higher.

[Copenhagen]

Do you have Norton/Symantec Anti-Virus (or any of it's suites or other variants) or another anti-virus program which may have quarantined (or even deleted) your Inbox? This is what normally causes this issue.

See: Eudora Forums > --== WINDOWS EUDORA ==-- > WIN - Technical Issues (crashing, error messages, migrating, etc.)
FAQ: Symantec/Norton AntiVirus and Eudora for Windows
http://eudorabb.qualcomm.com/showthread.php?t=4571

For recovery of deleted In mailbox see:

Eudora Forums > --== WINDOWS EUDORA ==-- > WIN - Technical Issues (crashing, error messages, migrating, etc.)
FAQ: Recovering "lost" data
http://eudorabb.qualcomm.com/showthread.php?t=4076

[Copenhagen]

Below are the WIN - Technical Issues FAQs are now merged to one thread.