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Zen Internet Support Forum » Services » Email » Webmail » Bulky attachments kill ability to open a message

Bulky attachments kill ability to open a message

Last post 07-10-2006, 10:56 AM by kengrace. 4 replies.


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04-10-2006, 4:57 PM 20707

kengrace
Joined on 03-10-2006
Posts 10

Bulky attachments kill ability to open a message

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There appears to be a bug in webmail when the in-box contains a message with a very large attachment. Attempting to open a message by clicking the subject link brings a 'message not found' error. Messages can be previewed OK by marking for selection and clicking 'view message'. Clearing the InBox by downloading brings everything back to normal.

By large attachment I mean probably in excess of 10 MB - it's been hard to pin down exactly. OK, e-mail shouldn't be used for attachments of this size. But in my job I receive a lot of unsolicited - but acceptable - mail which often carries multiple graphics files. Being unsolicited, FTP is not an option.

I was recently away from the office so relying on Webmail on a 'public' computer. After two days my InBox had become impossible to use. Its volume made it snail slow, and a few bulky messages triggered the bug which stopped me opening anything. The 'view message' preview is fine, but you can't delete from there. Web2Mail let me read messages but I couldn't delete the Spam, so everything ground to a halt.

I guess an option would be to create a 'bulky messages' folder and drag anything with a big attachment in there to clear later. But it would be good if the bug could be hunted down and shot.

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05-10-2006, 10:19 AM 20722 in reply to 20707

Jerry Nicholls
Joined on 01-06-2004
Posts 164

Re: Bulky attachments kill ability to open a message

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The issue with attachements it most probably down to the memory limits on PHP on our webmail server. Each attachment is going to have to be decoded and fed over to the client browser, which could consume significant amounts of memory, so there are limits in place.

The current webmail platform will have minor fixes applied, but many of its issues are much to major to be dealt with. I am, when I have time, working on my own webmail client which I will be releasing as OSS, so Zen can use it, but that will take some time. I've still to work out how I'm going to handle attachments etc too. My version is Perl based, as opposed to PHP, so won't have the same memory issues, but I will still have to impose some limits I suspect.

--
Jerry Nicholls
Principal Systems Engineer
perl -e '$_=q(print "perl -e \x27\$_=q($_);eval\x27\n");eval'

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05-10-2006, 10:29 AM 20723 in reply to 20722

kengrace
Joined on 03-10-2006
Posts 10

Re: Bulky attachments kill ability to open a message

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Thanks for that insight Jerry. I can see how large attachments are going to soak up memory, but I can't relate that to missing message errors. Maybe I'm being over simplistic but I would assume that each message becomes a database record and a click on the subject line calls the appropriate record from the database. I would expect memory limitations to prevent the display of a message carrying a large attachment, but what I experienced was that no message could be displayed, as if the database index was corrupt.

I have used a webmail system in which the content of the message was shown in a tool tip on mouse over. Like View Message but more interactive in that the message can be deleted immediately. Now that is a real time saver. Any chance of that in the future?

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06-10-2006, 9:10 PM 20772 in reply to 20723

cyteck
Joined on 23-06-2006
Leeds
Posts 1,299

Re: Bulky attachments kill ability to open a message

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Hi kengrace,

The problem with mouseovers which show the message content is that they might represent a significant security risk though. I know from past experience that in Microsoft email clients outlook & outlook express having the preview pane enabled allowed viruses to infect the machine, and I wonder if having a mouse over might throw up the same problems?

**Can I just ask what is considered the largest mail attachment size that somebody could send me without it totally crashing the system if they didnt use FTP instead?? just would like to know for future reference NOT that I want to try it.

Ivan

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07-10-2006, 10:56 AM 20780 in reply to 20772

kengrace
Joined on 03-10-2006
Posts 10

Re: Bulky attachments kill ability to open a message

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Yes, I guess there may be a security risk. Personally I have never had any problems with using the preview pane in Outlook Express – perhaps that is anti-virus software doing its job. Like the preview pane, I would expect any mouseover preview to be user selectable, so control of the risk is ultimately with the user.

As to attachment size, my problems seemed to be related to attachments of around 18 MB, but I don't know whether totalling applies and if you have a long queue with much smaller attachments the same problem would occur.

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