mozilla email problems

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Joel Gwynn asks:
| I'm using Mozilla to check my email.  Call me a sucker, but I like to be
| able to check multiple pop accounts.  For a while I've been putting up
| with sluggish, erratic behaviour, but I'm getting to my limit.  Right
| now, it won't even check my email.  When I start up the mail client, it
| connects, then says 'Receiving: message 1 of 414' (I'm on lots of
| lists), and just hangs forever, without downloading any messages.

I've noticed this, too.  I normally read my email here  with  mh  (in
text-only  mode,  not  with  xmh),  so that I can see what I'm really
getting. But I use Mozilla to get at email from my rcn account, which
is  mostly  spam  but might contain something important from rcn, and
which I don't know how to access any other way.   It's  *very*  slow.
Most  of the time there are no messages, so you'd expect it to take a
few milliseconds.  In fact, it takes several  minutes  to  probe  for
messages,  whether  there are messages or not.  I have no idea how to
figure out what its problem is, other than by spending several months
studying  the  source code enough to debug it.  I've sent comments to
bugzilla, and maybe a future release will work better.

| I can check my email fine with Netscape, using the same settings.  Has
| anyone else had this problem?

Heh.  I installed Mozilla because Netscape got to the point  that  it
shot  itself  in the foot, and simply bombed every time I started it.
No clue as to what was wrong.  I even removed my .netscape  directory
and  it  still  crashed.   I recently installed the latest release of
Netscape, and it's a total zombie, too. But Mozilla at least runs, if
somewhat slowly.

Now if I could only figure out how to successfully install the latest
KDE release ... (I tried, and the main effect is that the mail reader
now doesn't fetch messages at all, even though as far as I can  tell,
it's still the old program.  It's entropy, I guess.  ;-)

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