Re: Receiving email messages twice from Mail.

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:50:15 -0500:

Could it be that "multipart/alternative"
(the proper way of sending plain text plus html)
is incorrectly sending (or interpreting) "alternative"
(thus showing both)?

Please explain. Where do I find the "multipart/alternative"
settings in Mail and Eudora.

Not settings, but how a message is supposed to be structured
so that when both plain text and HTML are sent, only one is viewed;
all mail clients are supposed to follow the standard rules,
but if they go awry, one message might seem to contain
repeated content (within the same message, however,
not as independently downloaded messages).

I've also checked my Eudora personalities.
I'm not checking the same account twice.

Another observation: I don't always receive the message twice.

My comment wouldn't have applied anyway to receiving an entire
message repeatedly, rather than to just seeing the same content
twice in a given message.

Have you performed any "download headers only" or partial downloads?
(or used a size limit, then clicked a "retrieve from server" button
after having seen a note that there was more on the server?)

Every such normal re-fetch creates a new mailbox entry
for a new copy of the same message (and a new pitfall
when options to delete other things when emptying trash
start to apply to necessary deletions of previous partial
downloads, even though a repeat copy of the same message
is also still being saved and not discarded at all).

Server-side goofs could also be at fault;
for example, one of our POP server software updates
changed all the local "unique message IDs"
(different from "Message ID" in header),
and people who had left mail on the server for eons
got quite a surprise when it all downloaded again :(

By the way, we have had some ISPs go "trigger happy"
and re-transmit messages to us from their SMTP servers,
sometimes up to hundreds of times!

Even when the "Message-ID" remains constant,
the POP server gives a new "unique [local] ID"
to each re-transmission, hence not only does our server
fill up with the multiple copies, but so do email clients
end up downloading each copy separately.

In our case, it has probably been due to distributed causes
over several networks (our mail goes thru an outsourced
spam/virus filterer who then relays in real time to us),
and apparently some SMTP operators set so low a timeout
that they "hang up" before they hear our "OK I got the whole thing"
acknowledgement relayed back, so they then re-transmit later.

This is not likely to relate directly to your issue,
but it just indicates that there can be
"many a slip twixt the cup and the lip,"
anywhere from within Eudora itself to the sender's end --
but it's always a relief when there's actually
something in Eudora that you can do which fixes it,
instead of something elsewhere, which no one can do anything about,
or may not even be able to find out.

-[ ]-
.

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