[Dixonary] My Missing Messages

[Guerri Stevens]

This is mostly for Dan: I manually captured message summary information
from the Coryphaeus group from June 18th or so and compared that to
messages I have in my Email folders in Thunderbird. Message numbers
listed below are the numbers assigned by the Coryphaeus group.

I am missing one message from Chris Carson (1486), a bunch from John
Barrs (more info below), and two messages from Marijke (1378 and 1389).

Chris Carson: I notice that what the group shows as the Email address is
not always the same. Sometimes it's "clcarson" and other times it is
"ccarson@...". The missing message happens to have "clcarson" but there
are other messages that I did receive with that same address.

Marijke: I did get messages 1375, 1387, and 1388 which were around the
same time period as the missing messages.

Dan did mention that sometimes messages just disappear, so my
theory for Chris and Marijke is that the ones I'm missing were just
random disappearances.

John Barrs: I am missing 1371 and 1373 posted on June 20th. But I
received 1379, also posted on June 20th. However, I am missing all
messages posted after June 20th. This doesn't seem random
to me.

Is there anything I, or someone, can do to try to figure this out? John
suggests that this may be a Thunderbird problem. Is there anyone else
here who uses Thunderbird and can comment?

--
Guerri

[Chris Carson]

Guerri,

That's puzzling. I went back and looked at message 1486 and a number of
other messages in the list and they all show as from 'clcarson' which is my
Yahoo email address. I'm not sure why you wouldn't have seen that one. I'm
assuming that the 'ccarson@....' is how Yahoo is representing my 'regular'
email address with Netcom. I also occasionally post to tapcis.com. Maybe
someone with more smarts about how the listserv and Yahoo handle the various
means of getting a message into the Yahoo group would have a better idea.

Chris


Guerri Stevens wrote:


> I am missing one message from Chris Carson (1486), a bunch from John
> Barrs (more info below), and two messages from Marijke (1378 and 1389).
>
> Chris Carson: I notice that what the group shows as the Email address is
> not always the same. Sometimes it's "clcarson" and other times it is
> "ccarson@...". The missing message happens to have "clcarson" but there
> are other messages that I did receive with that same address.
>

[Guerri Stevens]

Chris Carson wrote:
> Guerri,
>
> That's puzzling. I went back and looked at message 1486 and a number
> of other messages in the list and they all show as from 'clcarson'
> which is my ...

My capture from the group shows messages 1421 and 1422 as ccarson@...".
1447 shows christopherlanecarson... (didn't spot that one
before).

Do you usually post to the group from your Email address or do you
usually go directly to the group and post there? Since there seem to be
3 different addresses for you among the message headers I captured, my
guess is that the full name may be your tapcis.com ID.

Among the stuff I captured, all my own messages show the Yahoo ID. But I
rarely post from tapcis.com or directly in the group itself. Mostly I
post from my Email ID. I wonder if Dan is somewhere pulling out his hair
over this????

Like you, I hope someone else will have a better idea of what's going on.

Guerri

[Guerri Stevens]

An update on my missing messages mainly for John but also for anyone
else crazy enough to be reading this.

I asked John to experiment a little because I was curious about whether
there was a problem with messages from the Coryphaeus group not getting
passed along to me, whether it was a problem with John's messages
specifically, regardless of where they came from, or whether it had
something to do with my use of Thunderbird. I suppose there are other
alternatives as well.

The Email address at which I receive the Dixonary messages is my
tapcis.com address. The mail addressed to me there can be accessed by a
POP3 Email client, such as Thunderbird, which I'm using. But it can also
be accessed as Webmail. So John sent me a couple of messages not from
the Coryphaeus group, but directly from him to me by Email. I logged
onto the Webmail and checked what was there. There were two messages
from John (not from the group) and a bunch of messages from the group. I
left everything there, without reading the messages, not wanting to take
a chance that I could not read them and yet leave them there too.

I then logged onto CompuServe using TAPCIS, with a setting that said to
"scan all mail". There were three messages from John. After checking the
headers, I left those where they were too.

Then I used Thunderbird to read everything as I always do. All of the
messages from the Coryphaeus group arrived correctly, and the three
messages from John addressed to my CompuServe address also arrived. The
2 messages John sent to my tapcis.com address that I saw in Webmail *did
not* arrive. I checked back with Webmail, and those two messages are now
gone.

So -- it is my belief that it is something about John's messages that
makes them fail for me, and it is something that is different from his
earlier messages (or at least some of his earlier messages).

There is a clue, though, in the CompuServe messages: John says he got an
error message for the tapcis.com messages saying "the user does not
accept email in non-Western (non-Latin) character sets". He is using US
ASCII coding. He also says "I have looked at my headers and the are
always sent MIME - why??" and of course I have no answer for that.

In short, he sent the message three ways (according to what the three
messages that arrived at CompuServe said): US ASCII, Western European
Windows, and Western European ISO. Only two of those arrived at my
tapcis.com inbox, and none of them was read by Thunderbird (or rather
nothing was passed on to me).

So it appears that one message went totally into the ether, perhaps
having been rejected by Webmail. The other two must have been rejected
by T-bird. Needless to say, I have no idea which was what. And it seems
to me that I should have some indication from T-bird when it rejects
something.

I remember that at some point when Dodi was the dealer, John had trouble
getting a message to her. John and/or Dodi, did you ever figure out what
was wrong and what fixed it?

I have checked my T-bird settings and for both incoming and outgoing
mail the character encoding is set to "Western (ISO-8859-1)". There are
check boxes for "apply default to all messages (ignore character
encoding specified by MIME header)" and "always use the default
character encoding in replies. (When unchecked, only new messages use
the default)". Neither of these is checked. I wonder if I should have
checked the first one (apply default to all ...)?

There is no US ASCII in the list of options for the character encoding,
but there is a "Western (ISO-8859-15)" and a few other ISO-8859 items.

According to the headers in the messages received by CompuServe, the
content type was text/plain for all three; one was ISO-8859-1, one was
Windows-1252, and one was Windows-1250.

I can't find anything in the Webmail settings that mentions the
character encoding.

Guerri

[Guerri Stevens]

A further update: I did actually receive the two messages of John's that
I saw in the Webmail view. I was looking for them in the Thunderbird
folder I've set up for Dixonary and not in my T-bird inbox.

The two that worked, based on the full headers, were ISO-8859-1 and
Windows 1252. So tapcis.com is rejecting Windows 1250 for some reason.

Guerri

[Guerri Stevens]

I did a bit of research this morning, going directly to the Coryphaeus
group and looking at message headers there. Note that the message
numbers are from the group's summary; these do not get passed along to
those of you who are receiving messages by Email. The dates and times
are also those shown in the summary; they may not be those you see on
the messages as delivered by Email. I apologize for the abbreviated
format I'm posting here, but I wanted to show a pattern, and I also want
to have a life!

As I stated in my original message, I was missing message 1486 from
Chris Carson. The headers show the character set as Windows 1250. I now
believe that my tapcis.com Email rejects that and sends a message to the
sender. In this case, the sender would have been the group itself, so
that message may not have been deliverable or, if delivered, was not
read by any human.

I was also missing messages 1378 and 1389 from Marijke. Headers for both
of these show character set UTF-7. Message 1387 from her, which I
received, has ISO-8859-1.

So in my opinion, my original theory that the 3 messages mentioned above
were random disappearances is wrong and the true story is that
tapcis.com is not accepting messages with certain character sets. Why
these particular messages were not using the ISO-8859-1 character set is
unknown. I do know that one of Marijke's was part of a discussion of how
the messages look and she was experimenting.

I did more extensive work on messages from John Barrs because I have
been missing quite a few of his. I will not bore you with the details,
but the pattern appears to be that many of his messages use character
set Windows 1250, which tapcis.com evidently rejects. And again, the
rejection notice would have gone to the group.

For John's benefit in case he can figure out what happened: for a period
of time messages were sent with Windows 1250 character set. But
intermittently you used ISO-8859-1. On June 20, messages 1379 and 1381
used the ISO set. But 1371 and 1373 were Windows 1250. I noticed at one
point references to Thunderbird and MS Outlook, and messages with T-bird
had the ISO character set and with Outlook the Windows 1250. I don't
know whether this is significant or not. Anyway, I am consistently not
getting your messages at the moment; if you deal, I'm in trouble!

Many thanks to John for his experiments which allowed me to figure out
what's going on. I don't know what I will do about it other than try to
find out why tapcis.com rejects those messages and whether I can change
some setting there that will allow me to receive them.

Guerri

[Chris Carson]

Guerri,

Well, there is a certain thread of logic to what you are seeing. The
ccarson@... would be either my main email address or my tapcis.com email
address depending on what follows the @, christopherlanecarson would be my
gmail address, clcarson could be my Yahoo email or my Optimum Online
address. I *usually* use my main address and post as an email to the Cory
listserv but will sometimes use one of the others if I'm having trouble with
a particular outbound server. The LAN at work seems to be intermittently
picky about servers and when that happens I might switch the "From:" on the
message. Of course I also occasionally post directly to tapcis.com or the
Yahoo group. Sheesh! What confusion. And I thought it was tough back on
the old Tapcis forum when Dixonary players would send their defs in from one
email address and the votes from another. <LOL>

Chris

>Guerri Stevens wrote:

>
> Do you usually post to the group from your Email address or do you
> usually go directly to the group and post there? Since there seem to be
> 3 different addresses for you among the message headers I captured, my
> guess is that the full name may be your tapcis.com ID.
>
> Among the stuff I captured, all my own messages show the Yahoo ID. But I
> rarely post from tapcis.com or directly in the group itself. Mostly I
> post from my Email ID. I wonder if Dan is somewhere pulling out his hair
> over this????
>
> Like you, I hope someone else will have a better idea of what's going on.

[John Barrs]

Guerri

Around the 20 June I was struggling to communicate with Dodo and people using OZWIN TAPCIS as their software and was changing code
pages - more or less as you describe As well as Outlok and Outlook Express I also tried different softwares Agent, ThunderBird,
Eudora, Mozilla, using this account and Gmail. All the other clients I dropped - as for other totally different reasons I have to
use Outlook for another client. I settled on using US=ASCII with Outlook (sorry, I don't know exactly how that relates to other
terminology) so that Compuserve accounts using TAP/OZ were not receiving my messages as atachments

Also around that time, right up until now I have been struggling with trying to get plain text sent. Then you reported in with a
failure to report in (if you get my meaning). I sent to you privately this morning with the results of that... I think - think -
that I have at last managed to force Outlook to send plaintext - at least its coming back to me as plain text so items like

+---------+
| |
| word |
| |
+---------+

now appear to me as a regular box (I added one there to see if it survives the into yahoo/cory, and out again)

The rules absolutly say that the format of a message is defined by the sender. Mine should now all be plain-text/fixed font - mind
you, Outlook then over-rides that if individual names in the addressbook specify something else and in MS wisdom, all imported
contacts specify 'let Outlook decide' - my contacts are now all changed, but replies to contacts not in the address book still seem
to default to ??? anything??? And I can find no other sttings to change

I am now using font encoding 'Western European'



JohnnyB [using email; via corypaheus/yahoogroups]

--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.8.9/39 - Release Date: 04/07/2005

[Guerri Stevens]

Hey, your *Coryphaeus* message got to me at my tapcis.com Email address!
The box looked good, too.

Guerri