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Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

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Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#61

Post by matwood »

my5thaccount wrote: post #6
Nutmog wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I almost totally agree. If it wasn't for security fixes, there would be no value in updating almost any software. If it's already working OK, just leave it alone. 15 years ago when people had problems with their graphics cards, the standard "fix" was to update the driver. Now we're still updating drivers. Weren't the problems supposed to have been fixed many years ago? It seems they introduce as many new bugs as they…

It's hard to explain to people, who aren't techies, why I, as a programmer, don't have the latest and greatest software installed asap. I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time.

> I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time.

Wait! What?! Make sure you do not run out of disk space or do any of the other things that instantly corrupt your VSS repo. Hopefully you were being sarcastic.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#62

Post by singlow »

I wasted a couple hours trying to help one of my clients who had this problem last week. What a pain it was. He had 5 devices connected to his account, 2 on pop and 3 on imap. It took 20 minutes just so listen to his explanation of emails appearing and disappearing and re-appearing based on which account saw them first. We spent the next hour turning on each device one at a time until we determined that his outlook pop client was the one deleting them, even though it was configured to leave them.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#63

Post by xpda »

This is typical of software development in recent years. The emphasis on newer platforms and technology (in the case iMap) results in new user interface limitations, as well as bugs, for existing users of older technologies (i.e. desktop, keyboard access, and Pop3).

I've found eM Client to be a good alternative to Outlook and WLM.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#64

Post by userbinator »

dmbaggett wrote: post #58

From a client standpoint, POP is not actually trivial. The main problem with POP is that unless you do something clever, determining the changes in the mailbox from time t0 to time t1 is both conceptually difficult and computationally expensive. This is because generic POP has no concept of a message UID, so there's no principled way to diff between states. In a very real sense, this means that POP is somewhat broken…

The UIDL extension adds a "UID" but it's just an MD5 hash of the contents -- meaning that multiple copies of a message appear to be the same message.

That sounds like a server problem; to quote the RFC,

The server should never reuse an unique-id in a given maildrop, for as long as the entity using the unique-id exists.

Why would you hash the contents? The arrival time should be unique, assuming no two messages could arrive at exactly the same time. That doesn't require any hashing.

I think POP could've been far better designed, without growing into the complexity of IMAP, with just a few little changes like this.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#65

Post by dmbaggett »

userbinator wrote: post #64
dmbaggett wrote: post #58

From a client standpoint, POP is not actually trivial. The main problem with POP is that unless you do something clever, determining the changes in the mailbox from time t0 to time t1 is both conceptually difficult and computationally expensive. This is because generic POP has no concept of a message UID, so there's no principled way to diff between states. In a very real sense, this means that POP is somewhat broken…

The UIDL extension adds a "UID" but it's just an MD5 hash of the contents -- meaning that multiple copies of a message appear to be the same message. That sounds like a server problem; to quote the RFC, The server should never reuse an unique-id in a given maildrop, for as long as the entity using the unique-id exists. Why would you hash the contents? The arrival time should be unique, assuming no two messages could…

I know you know this, but RFC != what servers actually do. :)

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#66

Post by to3m »

sk5t wrote: post #10
robzyb wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still use Visual Source Safe for my personal projects. It's never failed me in 20 years. Right click, check out, right click checkin. Perfect every time. 1st reaction: Horrified that you are still using VSS. 2nd reaction: Was that if it does what you need it to, well, then, who am I to judge? It doesn't matter whether the tool was created yesterday or 20 years ago. 3rd reaction: Does it really do what you need it…

This is horrifying indeed. I cannot imagine any reason to go on using VSS other than a very, very robust aversion to learning anything new. And yes, VSS is very buggy, although the bugs might not show up for a single-user environment always following the happy path.

I don't know if they fixed VSS in later versions, but I used it in a team environment from 2000-2002, and heard of other people using it similarly even later than that (including for art assets as well as code...), seemingly without any problems.

As well as the oft-unjustly-maligned check in/check out model, two other things it has going for it are that administration is pretty easy and it has both a command line client and a GUI client. (Which might sound like a ridiculous thing to say, but I have used some systems that have one but not the other - hopefully very rare these days though.)

This isn't really a recommendation for it, though, unless they've put a huge amount of work into it over the past fifteen-odd years (which somehow I doubt).

To get the same check in/check out workflow, you could try Perforce (though I heard from somebody that did it on AWS that the initial setup can be a bit fiddly) or SVN (though check in/check out evidently isn't quite how it's designed to be used, because (a) this is not the default, and (b) the performance can be pretty crappy).

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#69

Post by Aloha »

cesarb wrote: post #50
Aloha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as it works for you, thats great - I just hope you have a migration path if/when it stops working. I do however get the objection to newer is better, I keep getting besieged to move my projects from svn to git - to which I usually respond "Why, tell me what feature we need in git, that svn doesn't do?" I've yet to get an answer.

If you "keep getting besieged to move [your] projects from svn to git", I can guess that who is asking is probably downstream consumers of your projects. What they might actually be wanting: - Familiarity. Everyone uses git nowadays; like it or not, svn projects are the odd ones out. - Fast, offline querying of the project's history. With git, they have a full copy of the project's history in their local computer, wh…

I'm effectively using SVN as a CMS in this case - its just an easy way to sync files between workstations.

Re: Outlook 2016’s New POP3 Bug Deletes Your Emails

#70

Post by Aloha »

golergka wrote: post #51
Aloha wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, its not an arbitrary decision - there are some pretty decent reasons why Microsoft declined to support running 16 bit apps via NTVDM/wowexec - virtual 8086 mode isn't supported in long mode - now certainly, they could have ported the functionality from NT 4 they used to get NTVDM working on non x86 processors (it included an i486 emulator) - but to what end, realistically, how many people are still running 16-bit…

> unless you've been very forward looking from the start (see IBM System Z) Can you elaborate? System Z always looks curious, but I don't think that many people who aren't involved with mainframes professionally had a chance to even look at it

Everything I know of System Z I've read online - it was designed more or less for backwards compatibility from the start.
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