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su/oubeck
February 17th, 2008, 10:29 AM
Hello Sidney, and anyone else still out (t)here.

A problem suddenly developed on my Ozzie. When I click on the icon on the main front page to read my emails, the bar comes up "indexing mail", the blue colour fills up about 40% of the bar, and then the whole thing seizes up.

According to Windows Task Manager it's using up about 98% of the computer capacity, but nothing happens - it just sits like that for several minutes till I close down the programme via Task Manager (Ozzie doesn't react to anything).

Any suggestions please?

Thanks,

Su

sidney
February 18th, 2008, 12:59 PM
I have something for you to try, but it might take some digging around on your part because I no longer am able to run OzWin -- I don't even use Windows any more. The problem is probably caused by an email message that has something in it that is triggering a bug in OzWin. The solution would be to make a backup copy of the mail file, then use an editor to edit the file and delete portions of it until you narrow down to exactly what message is causing the problem. Often you will see something strange in that message, such as that it quotes another message with all the headers in a way that makes it difficult for OzWin to know where one message ends and the next one starts. You could then delete that message in the editor, or simply delete the line that appears to be the problem.

To narrow down the problem quickly, you can be systematic about reducing the problem one-half at a time. For example, the problem is most likely near the end of the file. So you can delete the second half of the mail file, verify that is now loads ok, then restore the file from the backup, then delete the last 1/4 of the file, and so on. Let's say that after you deleted the last 2000 lines of the file it loads ok, but when you only delete the last 1000 lines it locks up, then the next step is to delete the 500 lines at the end of that file, then you delete 250 lines, 125 lines, etc. By cutting the test in half each time you can quickly narrow down the problem to a single message. Tedious, I know, but doable.

-- sidney

su/oubeck
February 20th, 2008, 03:37 PM
Thanks for the pointer Sidney. Lots of things in life are tedious, but you still have to do them now and then, like tax forms, health insurance forms.....

The solution would be to make a backup copy of the mail file

Er, yes, but I can't find that file...... I was clearing out Ozzie and deleted a lot of old mail, purged messages, files in folders, saved outbox messages, I wonder if I've managed to knacker something en route. I kept about 50ish mails but deleted all the older stuff. What appears to be the mail file contains a couple of messages dated late 90's which I'm pretty sure would have been deleted long before now.

I also had the computer innards renewed and kept the old C harddisk with Ozzie, renamed it to D(Old C) and the new harddisk was C, and I moved Ozzie over. It worked, which surprised me a lot since I am the proverbial spanner-thower, and things went kaputt later after the clear-out.

Mmm, will rummage around a bit. :(

Su