Bad RETR msg from POP server (Tbird)

Mainframeguy

Debiant by way of Ubuntu
Joined
29 Aug 2002
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3,763
I am having a spot of bother sorting out my Tbird install after a reformat.... got most of it done now - big hassle with a few thousand mails on my server (must get that sorted!)....

BUT still having some issues picking up current mail - keep coming across the error shown in attached....

Anyone any clues? I have a feeling Tbird is the issue and it is not on the server side because I have other machines picking up my mail fine....
 

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It appears the syntax of the retrieve ("RETR") command is invalid.

Does it work okay with OE?
 
I am somewhat allergic to OE... use Office for work, but that's it... Point is it works on all my other Tbird installs on other machines... so do I have to reinstall Tbird (drastic!) or can I mend it?
 
I have never used a Mozilla product so I am not sure.

Is there a repair option in Add/Remove under Change for TBird?
 
heh when has that ever done anythoing other than uninstall, reinstall whie trying to hide the fact :p
 
HMMMmmm weirdness.... I assume you meant under Add/Remove programs? Well no, there is no repair option there.... so I just tried an uninstall and did a reinstall... thing is did either work - because on reinstall my accounts and settings (and mail!) were intact!

Unfortunately also intact was this error symptom! So I am back to the proverbial square one! any more ideas? Did I mess up uninstall somehow (seems the obvious one to me)
 
apart from uninstall issue (there's no other way I can see to make it complete - uninstall option does not come up, so ADD/REMOVE is the WTG but I guess I have to also do searches and maybe REGEDITS to rip it out properly?) anyway....

apart form that I did check around forums and came up with this and this and there's a shed load of other threads on it, almost all it seems saying not Tbirds fault.... have done the config switch for bumping timeout, to no avail, have disabled AVG mailscan when running, neither of those are helping me - anyone have any other ideas?

What really puzzles me is it works on other Tbird installs - so how the heck can it be a Yahoo mail issue? I mean logically captain, this has to be Tbirds fault - yet how?
 
If I were to click "Change/Remove" for Adobe Acrobat it would offer me a reinstall option, repair option, or uninstall option. Same for Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, etc.
 
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Mozilla (and probably most open source) does not have such - just runs the Uninstaller.exe (which seems to have issues from my experience :( )
 
OK - had another idea... shows I'm a little desperate though.... anyone recommend any other POP client mail app? Not OE and in an ideal world cross platform so I can run it on Linux too.... I'll goggle about, but thought I'd ask on this thread too...
 
This is on a windows xp machine ? If so try this create an account ( new ) and see if you can get it to run under that new user, then if so flush your current user account after saving whatever documents you need to keep and then delete that user account and flush the files, I have had cases at work were a user screws up something in their account , yet mine works fine , So I flush their accounts and make a new one.

And I mean windows xp user account not the email account
 
trying sylpheed now - for some reason it is painfully slow pulling the mail down and has some font issues... going to try what shamus says too because of these - we'll see...
 
This has me really irritated now, hence the bump.....

I have tried a few things - another email client (called Netmail) which gives the same error, CLAWS/Sylpheed which was not entirely satisfactory in other respects, BUT did seem to be able to retrieve all emails from server, even the new XP account as Shamus suggested (identical results), and even deleted a shedload more messages from the server in the hope one of them causes the problem- but to no avail.... Reading up a little on POP processing (stuff like this) I believe perhaps the other Tbird installs might hit the same problem if I deleted all their mail and set them to download it again.... I have emailed Yahoo even to see if they have made any changes in their Servers processing....

Meanwhile anyone else have any ideas how I could proceed? Is it an onerous or risky task to transfer mail across PC's for Tbird? It does not entirely suit me (being a lazy person) but as a last resort I could wipe all mail from POP server and aim to recreate it by transfer over network to this PC (of course I will have lost some mail from another account, but I have accepted that data loss already....)

Any and all ideas welcome - I really want to get this sorted out, to have my priimary computer unable to receive emails after a reformat is worryingly unacceptable...
 
delete the thunderbird folders in documents and settings after uninstalling thunderbird and reinstall from scratch. Back up any important emails you may need to keep since you're not using IMAP.
 
been there done that ..... I'll try it again to verify though....
 
Tried again - no change to behaviour....

Just to try to clarify - what happens is that one, maybe two messages are pulled from the server and then the RETR error is popped up by TBird.... If I retry getting mail sometimes it pulls more messages (no more than a few) and sometimes not... sometimes if I close and reopen TBird it will retreive duplicate messages from the server...

Last but not least there is one intentional difference I can think of here since the reformat, which is that I am using AVG rather than McAffee - but I have disabled the email scan plug on from AVG CC and it makes no difference...
 
OK - I am getting pretty desperate here - but have another plan now - which I may spawn a thread for.... I realise POP is pretty old world email and not the most secure either.... how about I make myself an entirely new email account and forward all my "legacy" mail addressed to the old one for now from the POP server onwards? Will this work (I cannot see any reason not ATM) and what would be best email protocol/client/service to go with? I guess it will make sense for me to forward my ISP email account there too... Anyone have any recommendations?

[EDIT] Just set up another Tbird account to my Gmail account (where I still have over 7,000 messages server side!) and it chugged along and POP'ed over thirty of them into an Inbox without the error message occuring... so what is up with the Yahoo account and how do I fix it is the question? I already deleted a thousand or so messages - perhaps if I delete even the few hundred remaining it will clear things up? Looks like I have been wasting my time trying to fix Tbird or use another client - looks like the problems lie fairly squarely with the Yahoo mail server (or can anyone explain better to me?) [/EDIT]
 
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I'd suggest using webmail for yahoo unless they offer IMAP.

Alternativley I know a very good, vary fast pop3/imap server where only the hard disk capacity limits mailbox sizes :)
 

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