Errors

If you have ever used MySpace you know that sometimes the servers have problems. Sometimes at peak nighttime hours, you won't be able to log in or check your mail. ("Unexpected error"). Or you won't be able to get to some friend profile. ("User account temporarily down for maintenance".) Or you have managed to log in, but some page you are trying to load just hangs, and your browser eventually times out. Or entire features will be temporarily unavailable, for hours, and you'll get a bulletin from "Tom". These errors are transient, and if you are patient and wait a few minutes and re-load, everything will work perfectly again.

MyMySpaceMail sends the exact same http requests that a web browser would do so it encounters the same errors you see when you use a web browser. So it has to handle the cases where a Myspace page is temporarily unloadable. It does this two ways.

1. When you manually check your mail by clicking on "Get New Mail", and if there is an error, MyMySpaceMail will report it in an annoying alert box. You can try again by clicking "Get New Mail" again.

2. On the other hand, when you have MyMySpaceMail check your mail automatically (a preferences option), then when it encounters a MySpace problem, it will automatically try again next time without reporting the error. For this reason, the best way to use MyMySpaceMail mail is to enable automatic mail checking and let it wait at least a minute (preferences option), and then try again. It's less frustrating to let it pause and then try again while you are doing something else, than for you to keep madly cliking reload in a browser.

Example Alerts

Login failure. This is what a login failure looks like. If you have ever logged in successfully (correct email and password, then if you ever see this login again, it means that MySpace's server has returned "unexpected error" and you can't log in. You should just try again, just like when you use your browser. However if you get this alert when you use MyMySpaceMail for the very first time, then you should make sure you've entered your password and email address correctly. (Preferences panel).

Timeout. This is an example of the kind of error you get when some page has hung. You can try telling MyMySpaceMail to wait longer for a page to come through (Timeout setting in the Preferences panel), but unless you have a really slow internet connection this probably won't help. It's best just to rely on MyMySpaceMail's global mail fetching timeout rather than to try to wait longer for each page. Since MyMySpaceMail only fetches (essentially) the plaintext of the pages it is after, and avoids (most) image and music and video downloads, usually when there is a timeout, its something more than just the page taking a long time to load because there's so much stuff on it.

Server Problem. Here is the kind of error you get when a page has been truncated with an "unexpected error has occured". This means a MySpace server has had a problem. Since the page was truncated, MyMySpaceMail will complain that it wasn't able to "get" or "find" something, like a friendID or, a part of a comment, or a user's image. If you begin to see messages like these constantly, and never have any success anymore, then it means MySpace has changed some of its html formatting, and you need to update to the latest version of MyMySpaceMail.

Another Server Problem. This usually means there's some link, probably an image link, that refers to a myspace host that isn't even reachable anymore. So you'll get this low level error. A retry will usually help, because eventually the host will come back up.

User error. If you try to send a comment to someone who is not your friend -- or to yourself -- or if you try to send mail to someone who has restricted his mail, then you'll get something like this. But you'll also get this kind of error if MySpace has returned a truncated page, an "unexpected error". Perhaps MyMySpaceMail's error reporting could be better here.

MyMySpaceMail bugs. MyMySpaceMail has some bugs of its own since no program is perfect. When you get an error like this make sure you are using the latest version.