This is a great program and I particularly like the IMAP and SMTP functionality. But the thing that I discovered is that it will give an error with Hotmail login names that have '.' (periods). For example, it will work flawlessly with login_name@hotmail.com but it will give an error with login.name@hotmail.com. In Outlook Express the error is:
Login failure: unknown user name or bad password
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Glad you like the program. To be honest, I'm just happy that someone's still using it... :)
That's an odd problem. I had a quick look at the code and I can't see any immediately obvious reason why it would discriminate against periods, but I'll take a look in more depth over the weekend. Sorry about that.
Btw, using this program with OE seems like an unusual choice, since it already has Hotmail integration which works quite nicely. If you don't mind my asking, why the combination?
Cheers,
Rob
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Anonymous
-
2008-06-05
Thanks for responding such rapidly.
Even though I just discovered your application, I'm sure others are using it as it seems to me to be one of the most efficient when it comes to reading Hotmail e-mail via a regular client application. Besides it supports IMAP proxy which I particularly like because it allows me to organize messages directly on my 4 Hotmail accounts :)
About the IMAP: It seems that I can't create or delete folders on the server. The message is ' This functionality has been temporarily disabled'. If the folder is there in the first place, I can use it to move messages to and from it.
The choice of Outlook Express in combination with Blue HttpMail is solely for testing as I don't actually use Outlook as my e-mail client so it sits around unused and I can use it for testing without worrying about profiles or losing e-mail. After I get something like Blue HttpMail working (with the help of Outlook) I can then use it with Thunderbird. Presently I use Webmail extension for Thunderbird but it hasn't been very reliable for me and I was looking for a replacement when I stumbled upon your solution at
Unfortunately, the folder creation/deletion functionality is disabled for the foreseeable future, partly due to a lack of time on my part (I believe it was originally disabled because it didn't work properly, due to some internal implementation details of the program) and partly because no-one has expressed much interest. However, I'll make sure I add it to the list of things to do. (Feel free to add a feature request via the tracker.) OTOH, I assume it's functionality that is used relatively infrequently, so signing into Hotmail at that point is not *so* awful... ;)
Anyway, I'll let you know what I find out about your bug.
Cheers,
Rob
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I've had a quick look, and discovered that it seems to send the initial request to the server in a format that I'd expect. However, there's only so far that I can investigate this problem without an appropriately named account, so it's at this point that I need to ask for your assistance... (Newly created accounts no longer have WebDAV access, so I can't just create an account with a period in the username for testing, disappointingly.)
Anyway, the first thing I need are some logs from a failed login attempt. There is information on how to turn on logging here http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=4463342 - but try not to be offended by the thread title... :) I just need the logs from the particular login attempt that fails, along with the HttpMailProxy.log for good measure (if it is present) - otherwise, I'll end up sifting through a whole bunch of stuff, because the logs tend to get large quickly. You can identify the appropriate logs by their name or timestamp.
Next up, I need logs from Outlook Express for a login attempt with the same account. There are instructions here http://email.about.com/od/outlookexpresstips/qt/et062406.htm for enabling IMAP and POP logging. For our purposes, enabling IMAP and HTTP logging is required. (You may have to restart the program before it will gather log information.)
Feel free to scrub any passwords that happen to appear in any of the logs, although none should by default. However, I need anything that looks like your username or email address left in there (I promise not to spam you later...).
Since your email address will be in the logs, you probably won't want to post them here. In that case, would you mind trying to send them directly to my SourceForge user account? The SourceForge email form doesn't have a way of adding attachments, but you might be able to send attachments to that account via your mail program, etc. If that fails, we'll rethink. (Apologies for the rigmarole. Every time I need to request logs it's the same, since I'm not aware of any SF-provided way of dealing with confidential information.)
Look forward to hearing from you.
Cheers,
Rob
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Anonymous
-
2008-06-07
Ok. Now I feel stupid. Only after you mentioned 'WebDAV' a few times in your reply I realized that your program is a proxy between the Hotmail's WebDAV interface and e-mail clients as opposed to parsing the Hotmail webpage. I went back to the project page on SourceForge and I read the information there again. Then I realized what the problem was with Blue HttpMail: because it uses WebDAV, it will only work with those Hotmail that still have access through WebDAV. So the accounts that were giving me errors were those without WebDAV acces. Those are new accounts, because Hotmail only started allowing '.' in login names recently.
But I also have the same account names with '_' instead of '.'. They are older and still have WebDAV access. That's why they are working with Blue HttpMail.
Because the accounts are similar, only the '.' part is different, and because at first I didn't realize that Blue HttpMail is using WebDAV, I thought that Blue HttpMail has a problem with '.' in login names. Well it doesn't. It was all me all the time.
Apologies for wasting your time and thanks again for creating this solution. Maybe you have plans to adjust your program so it doesn't use WebDAV anymore, but I suspect that would be quite a challenge. Good luck regardless.
Andrew
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In principle I have plans to modify the program to use the new Hotmail protocol, but unfortunately it *does* look like it would be quite tricky. Unfortunately, there's not much information available about the new protocol currently anyway...
Cheers,
Rob
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This is a great program and I particularly like the IMAP and SMTP functionality. But the thing that I discovered is that it will give an error with Hotmail login names that have '.' (periods). For example, it will work flawlessly with login_name@hotmail.com but it will give an error with login.name@hotmail.com. In Outlook Express the error is:
Login failure: unknown user name or bad password
Glad you like the program. To be honest, I'm just happy that someone's still using it... :)
That's an odd problem. I had a quick look at the code and I can't see any immediately obvious reason why it would discriminate against periods, but I'll take a look in more depth over the weekend. Sorry about that.
Btw, using this program with OE seems like an unusual choice, since it already has Hotmail integration which works quite nicely. If you don't mind my asking, why the combination?
Cheers,
Rob
Thanks for responding such rapidly.
Even though I just discovered your application, I'm sure others are using it as it seems to me to be one of the most efficient when it comes to reading Hotmail e-mail via a regular client application. Besides it supports IMAP proxy which I particularly like because it allows me to organize messages directly on my 4 Hotmail accounts :)
About the IMAP: It seems that I can't create or delete folders on the server. The message is ' This functionality has been temporarily disabled'. If the folder is there in the first place, I can use it to move messages to and from it.
The choice of Outlook Express in combination with Blue HttpMail is solely for testing as I don't actually use Outlook as my e-mail client so it sits around unused and I can use it for testing without worrying about profiles or losing e-mail. After I get something like Blue HttpMail working (with the help of Outlook) I can then use it with Thunderbird. Presently I use Webmail extension for Thunderbird but it hasn't been very reliable for me and I was looking for a replacement when I stumbled upon your solution at
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Using_webmail_with_your_email_client#Add-ons
Unfortunately, the folder creation/deletion functionality is disabled for the foreseeable future, partly due to a lack of time on my part (I believe it was originally disabled because it didn't work properly, due to some internal implementation details of the program) and partly because no-one has expressed much interest. However, I'll make sure I add it to the list of things to do. (Feel free to add a feature request via the tracker.) OTOH, I assume it's functionality that is used relatively infrequently, so signing into Hotmail at that point is not *so* awful... ;)
Anyway, I'll let you know what I find out about your bug.
Cheers,
Rob
I've had a quick look, and discovered that it seems to send the initial request to the server in a format that I'd expect. However, there's only so far that I can investigate this problem without an appropriately named account, so it's at this point that I need to ask for your assistance... (Newly created accounts no longer have WebDAV access, so I can't just create an account with a period in the username for testing, disappointingly.)
Anyway, the first thing I need are some logs from a failed login attempt. There is information on how to turn on logging here http://sourceforge.net/forum/message.php?msg_id=4463342 - but try not to be offended by the thread title... :) I just need the logs from the particular login attempt that fails, along with the HttpMailProxy.log for good measure (if it is present) - otherwise, I'll end up sifting through a whole bunch of stuff, because the logs tend to get large quickly. You can identify the appropriate logs by their name or timestamp.
Next up, I need logs from Outlook Express for a login attempt with the same account. There are instructions here http://email.about.com/od/outlookexpresstips/qt/et062406.htm for enabling IMAP and POP logging. For our purposes, enabling IMAP and HTTP logging is required. (You may have to restart the program before it will gather log information.)
Feel free to scrub any passwords that happen to appear in any of the logs, although none should by default. However, I need anything that looks like your username or email address left in there (I promise not to spam you later...).
Since your email address will be in the logs, you probably won't want to post them here. In that case, would you mind trying to send them directly to my SourceForge user account? The SourceForge email form doesn't have a way of adding attachments, but you might be able to send attachments to that account via your mail program, etc. If that fails, we'll rethink. (Apologies for the rigmarole. Every time I need to request logs it's the same, since I'm not aware of any SF-provided way of dealing with confidential information.)
Look forward to hearing from you.
Cheers,
Rob
Ok. Now I feel stupid. Only after you mentioned 'WebDAV' a few times in your reply I realized that your program is a proxy between the Hotmail's WebDAV interface and e-mail clients as opposed to parsing the Hotmail webpage. I went back to the project page on SourceForge and I read the information there again. Then I realized what the problem was with Blue HttpMail: because it uses WebDAV, it will only work with those Hotmail that still have access through WebDAV. So the accounts that were giving me errors were those without WebDAV acces. Those are new accounts, because Hotmail only started allowing '.' in login names recently.
But I also have the same account names with '_' instead of '.'. They are older and still have WebDAV access. That's why they are working with Blue HttpMail.
Because the accounts are similar, only the '.' part is different, and because at first I didn't realize that Blue HttpMail is using WebDAV, I thought that Blue HttpMail has a problem with '.' in login names. Well it doesn't. It was all me all the time.
Apologies for wasting your time and thanks again for creating this solution. Maybe you have plans to adjust your program so it doesn't use WebDAV anymore, but I suspect that would be quite a challenge. Good luck regardless.
Andrew
No worries :)
In principle I have plans to modify the program to use the new Hotmail protocol, but unfortunately it *does* look like it would be quite tricky. Unfortunately, there's not much information available about the new protocol currently anyway...
Cheers,
Rob