[Cutting to the core of the problem.]
> guess what? There is a MAIL and MAIL.MSG file in my upload zip packet! YARN's
> reply folder only listed what was in the "MAIL" file and uqwk only sent out
> mail in the "MAIL.MSG" file.
This has happened to me a few times. The reason has usually been that
the call to PKZIP failed to pack the messages correctly, maybe because
it ran out of memory.
Here's the way I understand it. When you write a message, YARN first
puts it in a file named MAIL. This is stored in the normal YARN folder
format, except that it is stored in the %HOME%\REPLIES directory instead
of %HOME%\MAIL. News articles are similarly stored in a file named
NEWS.
When you exit YARN, the MAIL and NEWS files are converted to SOUP format
files named MAIL.MSG and NEWS.MSG, and a file named REPLIES is also
created. These three files are stored in the upload packet, and then
all files are deleted from the %HOME%\REPLIES directory.
The way I figure it (and I'm just guessing here), if PKZIP fails, for
whatever reason, the files are *not* deleted from %HOME%\REPLIES, but
stay there until the next time YARN is called. However, then the SOUP
format files MAIL.MSG and NEWS.MSG will stay in the directory in
*addition* to the YARN folder format files MAIL and NEWS. When you now
exit YARN, it fails to convert MAIL and NEWS to MAIL.MSG and NEWS.MSG,
because the files already exist. And then when you exit YARN stores the
whole shebang -- old MAIL.MSG and NEWS.MSG, and the updated MAIL and
NEWS, in the upload packet file.
I've rarely been bit by out-of-memory problems, so this hasn't happened
often to me. PKZIP could fail for other reasons, though, and the result
would be the same.
> Of course to send mail, I to had rename MAIL to MAIL.MSG (original MAIL.MSG was
> already sent). Anyways, this explains why I sometime do not get replies from
> people! I don't know how many times this may have happened!
Did this work? I'm surprised, because MAIL without suffix appears to be
slightly different from MAIL.MSG. They both contain a series of
messages prefixed by a four-byte size indicator, but in YARN folders
(such as MAIL) that is in big-endian, while SOUP files (such as
MAIL.MSG) have them in little-endian order. Or maybe the other way
around, I keep confusing the terms.
Yngvar