froggie the gremlin

Here I am building up some street laptops (WinXP Home) with
appropriate applications. The mail client they've selected is Eudora,
which runs successfully on millions of XP systems (I think <g>). I
load it, configure it, test it, and of course it runs just fine. My
first user uses it for a few days, without problem, then all of a
sudden he receives this error code from an attempted Eudora mail
pickup...

Error reading from Network Cause [10107]

....and mail pickup from then on ceases to work. I dig through all the
OS/Winsock event codes and find the following....

Event Message
-------------
Event ID: 10107
Event Log: Application
Event Type: Error
Message: A system call that should never fail has failed.

{This information ©2001 Microsoft Corporation. The information is
reprinted from the Windows2000Events.csv file available for download
from Microsoft.} Same code list for XP...

I search the net only to find a few misdirected actions associated
with this error, the most common being that there's a corrupted msg in
the mailbox and it must be deleted before things will return to
normal.

I go to the server, delete the next msg in the list, and from then on,
all else works. Of course the fix has very little to do with
Microsoft's error description <g>

The user runs for a few more days then all of a sudden gets the same
error, but this time, only when sending (SMTPing) a msg, POP3ing
continues to work just fine. I won't get a chance to look at the
machine 'til tomorrow some time, but there's a good chance that the
msg waiting to be sent needs to be removed from the outgoing queue to
make it work.

Have any of you ever come across such an anomaly... possibly a data
sensitive path in the OS, maybe Winsock? This is nuts!

Any help, greatly appreciated. If I can't get to the bottom of this,
I'll probably have to abandon EUDORA for something else.

---<ribbit>

pblais

I have had this with Eudora as well as Outlook. It seems to be a mail
server issue where a message on the server gets "stuck" might be the
best thing I can figure out. I use web based mail (COX Services) and
can delete it and as you say it clears up. I also had the same
problem with DirecWay too. I would say in the past 3 years I have done
it on my wife's machine 3 times (she uses Outlook) and on mine once (I
use Eudora).

I can't see how this is an email client issue and if manually deleting
the message on the server clears it up it seems like it must be server
related.


---------------------------------------
Paul Blais - Hayes, Virginia

katrina knight

That's the only cause for that error that I can remember hearing of. It
isn't an error that comes up with Eudora very often though.

And that's pretty good confirmation that the problem is indeed with the
message on the server. (Either that or something else you're doing in the
process of deleting the message is the real reason it works after that.)

That, on the other hand, makes less sense to me. I don't know what would
corrupt messages both on the server and in the outgoing message queue on
the user's computer. Have you had a chance to look at it yet? If so, what
did you find?

What makes you think that switching to a different client is going to fix
the problem? The error message involved doesn't originate with Eudora, and
if deleting messages from the server fixes it, then the probability is
high that there is something wrong with the messages on the server. I
wouldn't count on using another program to fix this issue.

One question worth asking here is how sure you are that deleting the
incoming messages is really what fixes it? Have you tried other things,
such as restarting the computer then doing another mail check without
deleting the message in question? Has the computer in question been
thoroughly checked for malware? Malware has been known to cause some odd
winsock errors, and the system call that shouldn't be failing could be
failing due to malware of some sort, or maybe just due to a damaged or
incorrect file somewhere.

If it is possible to try downloading from that account with Eudora on
another computer the next time this problem happens with incoming mail,
that would be a good test to where the problem is likely to be located. If
the message is bad on the server, it should give the same problem no
matter which computer is used. If the computer itself has some sort of
problem that is causing the error, then using a different computer without
that problem should work fine. (Neither result is a 100% guarantee of
where the problem is located, but either will point to a more probable
location.)

--
Katrina