So wine and PlayonLinux seem to be a little bit funky lately. I was having no problems with my wine and playonlinux installs up until maybe January or so this year. Any new OS installations I've made since then have been problematic, though, particularly for PlayonLinux, which prior to then has always worked smoothly and well for me.

As of this week, the following setup works for me on MX Linux 17:

1) Use the original release of MX 17, not the newer .1 release, to make your initial OS installation. The original release seems to have fewer wine-related issues for some reason.

2) Use MX Package Installer instead of Synaptic to install wine. Search for winehq and install winehq-staging, which is what the MX Linux team calls its supported wine package. Doing it piecemeal by yourself in Synaptic seems to have horrible results :) Then run winecfg from terminal to get wine set up the way you want it.

3) After that is done, you can add winetricks and Play on Linux if you like.
(As of my latest MX 17 installation this week, I have not managed to get Play on Linux working properly. With the 17.1 MX release, it can't even seem to create a drive - it looks like it does but nothing happens. With the original 17 release, it can at least create a drive (but it is taking much longer than it used to to download the needed components, YMMV) but it crashes on any attempt to install or run any programs at all. So it's pretty much useless for me at this point.)

4) System wine seems to work pretty well for me at present, using the above installation approach. It was able to install and run all the programs I threw at it without any problems - except for Magic Mail Monitor 3, which is a program I really can't live without. (Someday I should try to pay someone to port it to Linux and make it native...)

So this post is actually about how to get MMM3 working properly on MX Linux 17.

This should work with any of the three latest versions of MMM3. I haven't tried it on anything older than v2.94b1 or v2.95 at this time.

If you keep trying to run MMM3 in wine and it simply won't start, it is probably because it is missing a dll or two.

Previously, the dll it required was mfc42.dll. I seem to recall that it was a little picky about which mfc42.dll it would accept. I think I remember downloading a lot of different copies of mfc42.dll from various online websites before I found one that worked for it.

Now, it seems to be looking for a new dll named mfc100.dll. I believe the developer Grigsoft mentioned that they had updated the program so it now uses 2010 redistributables, so this could be why things changed. (My old copy of MMM v2.95 on MX 16 runs fine with just mfc42.dll and without mfc100.dll)

To obtain mfc100.dll if you don't have it, just download the appropriate redistributable pack. The 64 bit version is named vcredist_x64.exe and the 32 bit version is vcredist_x86.exe. MX17 seems to install 32bit wine by default, if I am not mistaken, so that's the version I used.

Just use wine program loader to install the vcredist exe file, and then go into the windows system 32 subfolder in your wine folder, and look for the file named mfc100.dll which should now have miraculously appeared there. Copy it over to the MMM3 folder, and you are good to go.

* For some reason, MMM3 doesn't pick up on dll files that are in the system 32 folder. You have to put the dll files actually in the same folder as the magic.exe program itself for it to work. I don't know if mfc42.dll is still needed to run the program, but I didn't bother to remove the copy that I already had. I just added the mfc100.dll file so there are now two dll files in the MMM3 folder. It now runs very smoothly and quickly on MX17.

Update, Sat, 5-19-2018, 3:07:18 PM

Just finished another MX17 install and this time around, I did NOT need to add the mfc100.dll file in order for MMM3 to work. It could be because there was a pre-existing home drive which was re-used from a previous MX16 install in this case, and the existing home drive already had fully configured PlayonLinux/wine folders with programs already installed on them. There must be something that was installed in previous versions of MX Linux which isn't being installed in the current version, but I have no idea what. Anyway, at least it's an easy fix in this case - if it doesn't work for you, just get that dll file and stick it in the MMM3 program folder! :)


tags: magic mail monitor, PlayonLinux, MXlinux

This is an interesting topic that pops up every so often in tech support. I'll get people who registered for an account on a system years ago and have long since changed their contact information. No one ever seems to remember their passwords, and of course the reset password link won't work for them because they'll have lost access to the email account they registered with as well. So how do you help such people?

I always specifically ask them NOT to send me important personal documents like copies of their passports or drivers licences. I always find that to be such a Kafkaesque sort of request in such a Kafkaesque sort of situation. My response if customer support asks me for personal documentation over the internet* is standard: How do I know that I can trust YOU? I don't know you from Adam and I have no idea who you are. There is no way I am going to send out electronic copies of documents that could be used to steal my identity, to some random invisible call center person I don't even know the last name of!

(* almost never happens - I think it's happened to me twice in my life and both times it was from the same crappy payment processing company which appears to be the only payment processing company I've ever encountered on the internet that has an issue with my credit card - only one seller I've ever bought from uses them and I wonder how many customers they have lost because of this payment processor. The rudeness and incompetence of the processor is a story for another time!)

In practice (and this is specifically situational so it may not work for others), the solution has usually been to ask them if they can furnish one of the following:

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In some situations, if you run Claws Mail in a particular way (eg. from the ClassicMenu Indicator App), some menu items in Claws may appear greyed out.

I found a simple workaround for this. All you have to do is check your mail. Seriously! :) Just pick any account and do a quick manual check of it. The greyed out menu items will magically cease to be greyed out, and you will be able to click on them just like normal again. Hey presto! :)

tags: Claws Mail

Sat, 01 Jun 2013 06:57:10 +0000

It is pretty amazing that the filter freeze issue still hasn't been fixed yet after all this time, especially considering that it seems to be quite a widely suffered problem.

The bug list seems to imply that the issue has been fixed, but I haven't noticed any improvement at all in the latest version of Claws I updated to recently. In fact, if anything, Claws seemed to choke more than ever when I was trying to work on my filters.

For the time being, the only workaround I know of is to duplicate a filter whenever you want to add a new filter. If you just duplicate and then edit the duplicated filter, you're probably fairly safe from freezing, though it's still not a 100% guarantee. But if you try to add or edit a filter from scratch instead of going the duplicate method, you are pretty much 99.9% sure of having Claws freeze up on you the minute you try to click on one of those buttons like the "Move to" folder selection button.

Here's hoping someone figures it out soon! (Or perhaps I'll actually manage to learn some programming and fix it myself one of these days... >.< ;)

[Addendum Mon, 8-17-2015,11:07:33 PM:

They actually did finally fix this - recently! I think it was some time earlier this year? Doesn't freeze anymore now. yay!]

tags: Claws Mail, filters, filtering, freeze, freezing, email client, email program

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 22:33:22 +0000

Just noticed today that there is a very rapid flickering effect when you load the search screen in Eudora Pro (running via Wine). Eudora had one of the best search engines I've ever used, so this is a pity - and a bit of an eye-strainer! - but the search function itself does seem to work nevertheless.

I don't know if there are any solutions for this sort of thing - as a general rule I'm just happy if something mostly works on Wine, which Eudora does pretty well! I'm just noting it here for the record.

Other than this the only other issues I've noticed are

1) a problem with the re-drawing of the screen when you change the size of a mailbox window, eg. the Inbox, or if the window is smaller than the contents and you try to grab the scrollbar to view the rest of the content. The lines go all crazy. But if you close it and re-open it it's fine again, so that's not too bad.

2) selecting multiple messages from a list in a window is kind of weird. The first line you click on with your mouse never quite seems to register. You have to then click somewhere else, on a different line, before trying to shift-click or ctrl-click to select the other messages. After your second selection it will register and respond normally. Again, a minor issue and quite tolerable, all things considered!


tags: eudora, email client, email program, email clients

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 21:05:19 +0000

I have a weird problem which may or may not be due to something in my specific configuration of Claws Mail.

I have two main MH folders, one for work and one for personal emails, and at the same top level, a bunch of IMAP accounts as well.

When I draft an email, I usually use the "send later" button to queue a bunch of prepared emails, and then hit "send" from the main toolbar at a later time when I'm ready to send them out. I have never observed any problem when I do this with work-related emails, which go into a Queue folder under the Work MH folder, which is the first folder at the top of my sidebar.

When I send out a personal email, the draft goes into the Queue folder under my Personal MH folder, which is ranked second after the Work MH folder (but at the same top level). When I click "Send" for a queued personal email, I notice that Claws will first send out that personal email, and then access every single IMAP account in the sidebar, checking them even though I have not asked it to.

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Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:11:16 +0000

And yes, I mean the real Eudora Pro, not the bastard child called Penelope :P

Not much to say about this, as it seems to work pretty damn well in Ubuntu with Wine set to XP compatibility. (Last most recent version of Eudora Pro, paid)

The main issues I have noticed are:

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Mon, 07 Jan 2013 21:06:20 +0000

Magic Mail Monitor finally works in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS!

I was never able to get it to work before, but I tried again recently and for some strange reason this time around it worked!

All I did was copy over the entire folder of the already installed and working copy of MMM from my Windows machine, and paste it into the Program Files folder in my Wine directory. I have MMM set for WinXP compatibility in Wine.

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Sat, 20 Oct 2012 02:03:15 +0000

This one turned out to be relatively easy :)

If you use Claws Mail, you may have noticed that there isn't any obvious way to play a sound to notify yourself of new incoming mail. Actually, it is fairly easy to set up, and extremely configurable depending on the approach you choose.

The first thing you need to do regardless of which approach you take is check to make sure you have a command line audio player installed on your system. The one I picked was sox because it seemed very configurable and flexible, was simple to use and worked well.

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Thu, 18 Oct 2012 00:44:16 +0000

To work around certificate issues when trying to check mail with Claws Mail, the following lines can be added to clawsrc, which should probably be in your home folder somewhere inside the clawsmails hidden directory unless you had an unusual setup configuration.

skip_ssl_cert_check=1
unsafe_ssl_certs=1

Of course this is an Enable At Your Own Risk kind of thing - it depends on how dangerously you like to live and how much importance you place on the reliability of certificates. Don't blame me if you do this and smoke starts coming out of your monitor :P ;)


tags: Claws Mail, ssl, certificates