Mail Problems

There are a number of potential problems you may encounter whilst fetching your emails. This section of the website is designed to highlight some of these, and how to solve them.

Deleting large emails 
Occasionally you may receive large emails from people, which can clog up your mailbox, especially if you've only got a dialup connection. Rather than emailing support, especially if the problem arises outside normal office hours, you can delete specific messages directly from the server by using the WebMail system.

You may want to enable the 'message size' option in WebMail, go to the 'Options' and select 'Index Order'. You can then add a 'Size' column to the message listing display.

Mail connection is lost or timed out 
This problem is more prevalent when using the Voyager software for RISC OS. Sometimes it may announce that you've received x number of new messages, but mid-way through downloading them you receive a message saying "Connection refused, lost or timed out" and the mail fetch is aborted. When you try again you find that you have may have a different number of new messages announced, but then Voyager starts downloading the same messages again.

This is generally caused when someone sends you some excessively large emails, such as photo images which are more than 1M in size. Voyager can sometimes have difficulty downloading very large emails, which may cause it to abort the fetch part way through the download. However, because (as far as the Orpheus server is concerned) you've not logged out cleanly so, for security reasons, your messages will not be deleted. This means that next time you connect, your software (Voyager) will start downloading from the beginning again, hence downloading duplicate messages again. But, because the original, long message is still there, invariably the same problem will occur again and you've seemingly got into a never ending loop.

If you encounter this kind of problem, the solution is relatively simple - and that is to ignore your normal email fetch (Voyager) temporarily, and login to the WebMail system. This will allow you to view all the messages on the server without actually downloading them. You can see if there are any large messages waiting and delete them directly from the server, then logout. You can subsequently restart a mail fetch using your normal software and hopefully, this time the messages will be downloaded successfully.

Notes
1. If you're using Voyager, you can disable mail fetching by going into the Preferences->User and ticking the 'Disable mail usage' option part way down the configuration settings. Click Save and Voyager will disable future mail checks.
Once you've cleared the long emails via WebMail, you can go back into this section and re-enable mail usage by unticking the Disable mail usage button.