We need a working E-Mail program

Until one year ago, Messenger Pro was halfways working. But since the Upgrade to Riscos 5.28
there is no chance to get it to work again.

And i’m absolutely not happy, to pay yearly a
lot of money for an upgrade, to get it after several hours trying to work again slow and unstable.

We really need an email program, which can do IMAP,
and is configurable over a configuration menu, not
by searching textfiles, to try, to do some configuration of textfiles until it works.

A working email programm is even more needed as a browser.

I have Messenger Pro version 9 working fine here on RISC OS 5.29 including with IMAP.

In order to help more we need some more basic information, like version of Messenegr Pro you are using? what service are you trying to access, by this I mean which IMAP service. If it’s Gmail, they have changed how it is accessed by what they call ‘legacy’ type email programs as they consider virtually anything not using their webmail interface as insecure!

Your last comment is a little confusing:

A working email programm is even more needed as a browser

If you mean we need to be able to access our emails via a web browser. Then you need to realise its a moving target, and we simply do not have the developers to keep up with the behind the scenes changes people like Google keep changing. The Iris browser could at one time I know access the more basic version of Gmail webmail interface, not sure it can now and in any case Google have indicted it will be removed in about February 2024.

Support is better directed to R-Comp, however…

But since the Upgrade to Riscos 5.28

What actually happens? Does downgrading to an earlier version of RISC OS make it work again?

which can do IMAP

I don’t have MP, so I’m only looking at the promotional text which suggests it does support IMAP.

and is configurable over a configuration menu, not
by searching textfiles

That’s a UI thing. Could probably be added…

until it works.

<rant>

Once upon a time the world was segregated into walled gardens. AOL, CompuServe, and so on.

As more and more people started to see the internet as a useful way to communicate, we had a great time with (mostly) open protocols and stuff that sort of worked.

But now? Commercial interests have noticed there’s money to be made, and has shepherded people back into their walled gardens. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and so on.

As for email? Well, plain regular email is a historical relic. Even when you turn off all the fancy text features, many clients (especially mobile ones) will still spit out MIME encoded gibberish. You’ll just be lucky if it’s actually sort-of readable and doesn’t get sent as something awful like base64. You’ll only know about this when RISC OS users complain, as other mail clients are equally broken and do the same sorts of things.

On top of this, there has in recent years been a Big Push to make using regular email about as annoyingly painful as possible (instead of “installing the app”). For Yahoo! (which is comical given their urine-poor security that I’m still seeing messages sent by mom!) I need to have an application specific password. No, not a password for my Android email client, a password for each individual device. Thanks to a lot of blahblah in the connection and headers, it can tell one from the other.
Google is similar, but not only do I need an individual password for each device, I also need to wade into the settings to find where the “allow insecure connections” option is, and wade through a lot of bollocks telling me that using IMAP/TLS will suddenly cause the world to end.
Once in a while, it is pointed out that such sign-ons may eventually be deprecated in favour of OAuth2 so I should consider changing to a different mail program, such as their app.

See? They’re even trying to make email a walled garden these days.

Oh, and don’t expect any form of insecure connection to work. The days of telnetting to port 110 and issuing commands like LIST and RETR are long gone. You’ll need TLS support, and a client that knows how to use it. Anything that doesn’t require at least that is a toy and shouldn’t be used for anything serious (you do use a different password, right?).

In short, however good MPro may or may not be (as I said, I don’t have it), things are changing in the world of email and getting the damn thing to work is increasingly harder. I only have heyrick.eu set up on my new phone because (with K9 Mail) because, dammit, I can’t be arsed to argue with Google/Yahoo for yet another set of device specific passwords. Given that I’ve uploaded all of my advent calendar videos to YouTube without signing in once and that my phone is kept permanently signed into Google (with access to my user profile in all the Google apps), this nonsense is just some lousy theatre designed to make the GMail app look so much easier to use.
Bastards.

</rant>

A working email programm is even more needed as a browser

Your last comment is a little confusing

I think Erich means than rather than as.

I have Messenger Pro version 9 working fine here on RISC OS 5.29 including with IMAP.

What IMAP server (service) is that with?

As I outlined in my talk the other week at WROCC about RISC OS and Linux co-existing, M-Pro 8 does not play well with my own local IMAP server (Dovecot on an Ubuntu server 22.04 system), despite the same server being fine with a range of other clients (including M-Pro for Linux, otherwise known as Gemini) on various platforms.

There are two issues… The first is that, despite no other client having a problem, M-Pro is unable to see any folder other than INBOX, however I configure the root folder settings. The documentation is “unhelpful”, and Andrew’s advice (“just leave the field empty”) doesn’t seem to have much effect.

I might be able to investigate this further, were it not for the second issue, which is that after a short while, the whole application just starts to stiff on loading with a string of Aborts on Data Transfer. I can see no reason for this, and have found no solution other than deleting NewsDir and starting again from scratch with a clean account. It then works for a short while, before the problem reappears – and around the loop we go again.

If I had any confidence that M-Pro 9 might fix this issue, I could possibly be persuaded to upgrade. However, given that IIRC 7 to 8 didn’t solve anything, I’m reluctant to throw more good money after bad.

Perhaps if R-Comp offered support via the mailing list that their own application encourages people to subscribe to, it might be easier to get help with it, too. :-(

If it’s Gmail, they have changed how it is accessed by what they call ‘legacy’ type email programs as they consider virtually anything not using their webmail interface as insecure!

They consider anything not using a secure connection which has been authenticated securely as being insecure. This isn’t too unreasonable!

I am using a deficated server on a linux host.
I hot two mail configurarion:
One TLS/SSL
Anither one not protected (No SSL )

But Messenger Pro (8.04, 8.05) does not even try to connect.

Sadly messenger does not give any logs, it just does nothing…

It is sitting on the Iconbar, and does nothing, when i click on it with adjust, i can enter the user name, clic connect, but it does nothing, loging the internet trafic, it does not even try to connect..
At least a such program should log what it is doing, or why not.

antispam + pluto

antispam + pluto

For IMAP?

If you run your own servers, would you perhaps be willing to set up a test user so that I can test Messenger with your server? It is very hard to debug a problem that a) you don’t fully report, and b) we cannot reproduce. Alternatively, have you considered asking to try v9 to see if it fixes your problems? I’m usually pretty open to such things – whilst I cannot always guarantee a solution (the source code for the IMAP component is handled by someone else), if you’re fair with us (ie. don’t just run off the with software that you try) then I’m more than happy to be fair with you. There are lots of positive ways to tackle this – email, phone, zoom, skype. Let’s try those first.

Also, Stave, maybe dig a little deeper into Google’s approval processes. There’s quite a good article about it from the author of Pegasus Mail. It’s pretty draconian.

For situations where Mpro isn’t the solution, perhaps the web browser option will allow you to use web access offered by most linux email systems?

A working email programm is even more needed as a browser.

I find myself using my mobile devices and the webmailing interface most of the time nowadays – not sure when I last fired up my “proper” mail client. So I disagree – the browser is a good mail client, so it would be much more useful to have a stable performant capable browser. Very unlikely to happen though.

yes !antispam does IMAP. With AcornSSL it does secure imap.

It can talk to messenger pro on the RISC OS side if !pluto doesn’t please you.

I admit I haven’t tried to get to anything but my inbox…

yes !antispam does IMAP.

Erm… Sorry, but it doesn’t. It does POP3.

Erm… Sorry, but it doesn’t. It does POP3.

Isn’t that a case of the fetcher being designed for POP3, with the SMTP send handled for the client by a different utility?

Whereas, use of something like Curl and appropriate scripts, the client system could equally handle IMAP? (With Curl TLS for IMAPS)

I never looked at that, but I doubt it would be as simple as you make it sound. The program’s structure is set up for POP3. I.e. fetch stuff (or not) and that’s it. It doesn’t have a proper IMAP front end.

I doubt it would be as simple as you make it sound

That wasn’t the intention, installing Curl, producing a set of scripts to query the server and fetch items from the server would be a fair bit of work.
Then other obvious issues:

1. No idea whether the format of the downloads would match anything that the like of Pluto would accept. Biggie.
2. IMAP is a design to leave the mail on the server by default so that the user’s other client devices can sync the same content, so there would need to be a method in the fetcher/sender to remove selected items.
3. If you delete from the server, does that delete from all the clients at next sync?

I’m sure there’s more.