Scribe Trouble Shooting Guide
Lots of people ask for assistance with Scribe and a lot of the time it comes back to the
same issues again and again. So this is a little guide that will help explain the procedures
to follow to give yourself the best chance of resolving the issue at hand. You may even find
the answer your looking for right here.
Latest Version:
For starters please don't email me until you have at least tried using the latest version of
Scribe (even if it's a 'test' version). Especially if the issue is a crash. To keep your
old version intact backup the files:
- scribe[.exe]
- Scribe.r OR ScribeOptions.xml
- Scribe.lr8
To a different directory and then you can restore your current setup if needed.
Connection Issues:
Problems sending and receiving email are quite common and usually are related to incorrect
configuration of your settings.
Firstly, anytime you have an issue connecting to a server to send or receive the account
will tell you be lighting one of the LED's as red on the status panel on the main window.
This tells you there is a problem and you need to look into it. It's deliberately done this
way so that errors don't interrupt your work flow. Scribe makes a general rule of not putting
up a message box unless you click a command. That way you can compose email in peace even if
the connections are failing in the backgroud. This is important for users that don't have
a reliable connection or server.
Once an account has failed to connect, open the status panel (on the main window) and click
on the account in the list. The first two columns show you the send and receive status.
Now you can click on the "Log" tab to see the communication between the client and server for
the currently selected account. This is coloured for easy reading, green showing you successful
responses from the server, blue marks the commands sent from Scribe and red marks errors from
the server. These are the ones to look for. Sometimes the error message will be obvious, and will
prompt you to fix something, otherwise if you don't understand it then right click on the log
and "Copy to clipboard". Paste the log into an email to me and I'll attempt to decipher it.
If there is no log message that indicates an error then it's probably a bug in Scribe. The next
step is to create a log file of the connection. To do this follow these steps:
- File -> Options
- Debug tab
- Switch on "Output debug statements to 'Scribe.txt'".
- Run the connection in question again.
- Send me 'Scribe.txt' in the same directory as the Scribe executable file.
- Delete the scribe.txt file and switch off tracing in the options.
This produces as execution log, that lists all the sections of code running while the connection
thread executes. It can narrow down the part of code that failing.
Another level of logging that can be useful is a content log which can be setup in the debug options.
This logs the bytes sent and received across the socket connection. You might want to do that if
you feel it's relevant to the problem your having.
Common Sending Errors:
"550 relaying denied" or "550 we do not relay, sorry"
Your ISP's mail server will only send mail from senders it accepts as local to itself,
and it's not accepting you as local. A mail server can determin how "local" you are
either by the email address you specify in the From: field or by the IP address your
connecting from. Generally this error message appears when you specify an external From:
address in the outgoing email. e.g.
Server: mail.my-isp.com
From: user@some-other-isp.com
The other common reason is connecting to your mail server from another network outside
the ISP's domain. Occasionally this error is caused by a mis-configuration of the mail
server itself, and you should contact your ISP's admin staff if you believe the first
2 reasons given above don't apply to you.
Note: 'Relaying' is used by spammers to get someone else to send their spam. Thus most
mail servers now days are configured to prevent relaying mail.
"Syntax error in EHLO command"
You'll get this with ESMTP switched (authenticated SMTP) and you don't have your username
setup correctly. In fact username is a misleading field name, as what should really go there
is the domain part of your email address. i.e. for the address 'me@privacy.net' the domain is
everything after the '@' symbol.
Crashes:
This is covered in detail here.