IGetMail - Change History

A quick list of the new and improved features added to IGetMail by version number. 

IGetMail 3.0.1 Patch for Existing 3.0 Users - Posted July 18, 2008

• Fixed Unexpected Shutdown - Some users of Version 3.0 were experiencing an unexpected shutdown of IGetMail when IGetMail was sending new email to their Exchange Server.  The error was caused by poorly constructed email headers which exposed an error in IGetMail's parsing code.  Version 3.0.1 contains the fix for this situation.

IGetMail 3.0 Upgrade (Fee-Based) - Posted July 7, 2008

• New User Interface – In the past, IGetMail had a wizard based User Interface.  Version 3.0 now has a full user interface allowing you to see the tasks that IGetMail is performing as it pulls your email messages.  Includes new Message Log where you can see recent events that IGetMail has performed.
• SSL Support & SMTP Authentication - IGetMail now supports SSL access to both POP3 and SMTP servers. 
• Option to leave Email at the POP3 Server - Note that some POP3 servers do not support this feature, so it is dependent on the POP3 email server.
• Faster and Concurrent Email Downloading – The new scheduler can run up to every 20 seconds to check your email.  We find some POP3 servers cannot respond this fast, so you may need to adjust this rate based on your network and servers.  IGetMail can also pull email from multiple email accounts at the same time.  If one account has a large message, it will not stop the rest of your accounts from receiving their email.
• Delivery Rates – You can set the number of messages that you want to deliver per connection to your local email server.  Some servers assume they are under attack if they receive too many messages too fast, so this is a number that you may need to adjust to best fit your network.
• Schedules – The scheduler has been expanded, in the past you could only specify a weekend and week day schedule.  Now you can have as many schedules as you want.  You can define what days to run and what times.
• Stored Email – IGetMail now keeps a copy of the recently downloaded email messages.  This gives you the opportunity to redeliver messages if needed.  If you make a change in your configuration information, you can tell IGetMail to redeliver the messages using the corrected or changed configuration.  This is very helpful when you initially setup IGetMail or your email server so you do not lose any messages.
• Rules – You can now specify simple rules for IGetMail to use to process your messages.  Rules are used to correct for extra information that ISP may insert in your email that cause non-delivery-reports from being generated.  You can also exclude addresses, do not deliver messages, forward messages, etc.  The rules allow you to correct for routine problems that need to be corrected, the rules feature is not intended to replace an anti-spam nor anti-virus solution.
• Improved Log Management – With previous versions of IGetMail, the trace logs would grow rapidly and could consume a lot of free disk space.  With Version 3.0, the logs are constrained to recording only the most recent 500K of data to cap their size.

IGetMail 2.4 Patch Update (Free Update):

• Improved support for deleted messages - After IGetMail sends the delete message, there were times when it  would wait forever for a response from the server. If the server did not respond or responded with anything except success, the wait would endlessly continue. Corrected this infinite loop by breaking when there is no response after the standard timeout period has expired.
• Improved support for group accounts - If there were 2 or more group accounts, they always cross checked the domains even if the user selected to not translate the users between the domains.  The cross checking code now checks the translate flag
• Removed white spaces at the end of email addresses - If the email address ended with white spaces, the white spaces were included in the domain name of the address and could fail the domain tests, thinking the email address was outside of the actual domain.  White spaces are now removed.
• Improved support for incomplete email addresses - Changed the way incomplete email addresses are handled.  Previously all incomplete addresses such as “name” only that is missing the “@domain” would be automatically corrected to “name@defined domain”.  This was changed such that if there is an incomplete address and a complete one, the complete is processed and the incomplete is ignored.  This prevents mailing list generators from creating false NDR messages.
• Added support for multiple DeliveredTo PrefixToIgnore settings.

IGetMail 2.3 Patch Update (Free Update):

• Improved support for incorrectly created POP3 headers - Certain POP servers were incorrectly building the POP3 header on email messages.  These server added the date time stamp for the email in plain text and not in POP3 format.  This problem does not cause IGetMail any problems, but did cause downstream clients problems interpreting the header.

IGetMail 2.2 Patch Update (Free Update):

• Better handling of large messages that are duplicates - If the email message was a duplicate message and the email server incorrectly stated the size of the email message then IGetMail could lose synchronization with the POP3 server.  IGetMail checks for duplicate messages.  When it finds a duplicate it needs to download the duplicate and then delete it.If the message had a length provided IGetMail used the length instead of the end of message marker.The code was changed to look at the end of message marker and not the length.
• Better handling of large numbers of email messages in one check - If the number of messages downloaded exceeded 256 IGetMail could overrun its storage for the message IDs.  IGetMail watches for duplicate email messages within the scope of a single check.  It does this by recording the email message ID for each message downloaded during that check.The code changed to support an unlimited number of messages.

IGetMail 2.1.1 Patch Update (Free Update):

• Fixed timeout problems - IGetMail would report a timeout when downloading email.  It would try again later and then get the mail.  The process of handling partial TCP/IP packets when downloading the email was improved.

IGetMail 2.1 Patch Update (Free Update):

• Support for selective domain mapping - When the local email server supports 2 or more different domains the mail was always sent to the default domain.  You can now select whether to map all email addresses to the default domain or to leave the domains as is.  For example you have 2 domains:  A.com and B.com.  You can either have all email sent to domain A.com or have IGetMail direct mail intended for A.com to go to A.com and mail intended for B.com to go to B.com.  
• Improved support for attachments - Attachments seem to cause the download process to create an error.  Some email servers inform IGetMail what the size of the email message is.  There are certain circumstances when these servers report the wrong size for the mail message.  The errors occur most frequently with attached files.  In version 2.1, size is no longer used to detect the end of the email message.
• Improved name detection - Blank or nested email, as well as comments in email names produced incorrect results.  Support has been added to detect empty email names and nested names "<name>" with simultaneous double quotes and brackets.   Support for comments in email names was also improved.
• Better error handling - When the local server or the remote server is not able to respond, the product will eventually shut down.  Depending on the speed of the machine and other factors concerning the machine that IGetMail was running on, a resource leak could build up and cause the product to shut down.  This only occurred when certain errors where repeated.
• Better timeout handling - Some servers are slow to initially respond and  IGetMail had only allotted 60 seconds for the initial responses.  This value has been increased to a default of 4 minutes (240 seconds) and a setting has been added to the configuration file to allow the user to set the timeout at will.  To change the default setup, edit the IGetMail.INI file in the folder where IGetMail is installed.  Under the section [Schedule], add the line "TimeOut=xxx" where xxx is the number of seconds.

IGetMail 2.0.2 Patch Update:

• Corrected the default port for the SMTP server to 25 - The default value for the SMTP server port value has been changed to 25, rather than the previous setting of 0.
• Improved handling of large duplicate messages - Mail sent to multiple recipients may repeat and send the message to the recipients more than once.  When mail is addressed to more than one recipient many email servers will store one copy for each recipient.  IGetMail recognizes the duplicate messages and only sends the mail to each user once.  IGetMail checks for the duplicate message as it is downloading the message.  IGetMail uses threads to simultaneously download the message and communicate with the email server.  Some email servers can handle concurrent communications and other servers become confused.  If the email server becomes confused, it would ignore IGetMail's attempts to delete the duplicate message, causing the email server to regenerate the message.  Version 2.0.2 now waits until messages "settle" before issuing commands.
• Improved transfer speed through high speed connections - Multi Mega byte messages seem to download slowly over very high speed data lines.  The TCP/IP data processing within IGetMail has been improved for large messages.  We performed tests with 20MB messages over high speed networks (internal 100MHz Fast Ethernet), the code was changed to achieve performance equal to the line speed.  These changes will be noticeable with high speed Internet connections such as T1 or DSL.

IGetMail 2.0.1 Patch Update:

• Improved handling of "bounced" mail - The SMTP Server receives email but cannot determine who sent it. This error would occur when someone sent a "receive reply request" or if the server was configured to reject all mail to an unknown recipient.  In both cases, the email server did not who to address the reply or bounce back to.  Previously, the senders name was left blank (Anonymous).  IGetMail 2.0.1 searches for the "From:" field and sets the senders email address based on the from address.  Note this is only active on group accounts.
• Improved modem error handling - Modem busy signal, line drop or rejection sometimes caused a future modem access problem.  When these modem issues happened, IGetMail was not "forcing" a complete clean up of the dial up networking protocol.  This problem was only occurring with specific modem types or device drivers.  IGetMail 2.0.1 now forces a complete resetting of the dial up networking protocol.
• Added ability to select port values - IGetMail was using the standard ports for SMTP and POP3 and did not allow for the administrator to make a change.  Previously, the port values for SMTP and POP3 were hard coded into the product.  With 2.0.1, you can change the port values from the standard values.  This is useful for special security reasons, allowing you to hide the mail server on a non standard port.
• Improved "blind carbon copy" (BCC) support - Mail sent To and Cc works fine, but Bcc (Blind Carbon Copies) are sometimes ignored.  Email sent to individual accounts always works fine since the mail has been sent directly to the Bcc account.  Mail sent to domain accounts has problems because the BCC address is supposed to be suppressed.  However, sometimes a message contains clues inserted by the email servers that IGetMail can use to infer the Bcc address.  Version 2.0.1 has been improved to hunt for more Bcc clues to route mail to the appropriate Bcc accounts.