Classic Apps Barely Communicating on TCP/IP

[Toe]

Hi. I'm having some strange issues with Classic Apps running under OS X. They all work perfectly if I boot under OS 9.

• Outlook Express 5.0.3 works perfectly with my POP accounts, but does not work with IMAP accounts. It will get a count of the number of messages in a mailbox, but will then just sit there, not communicating any more. IMAP does work fine in Mail.app, so the problem is not explicitly IMAP-related.
  
• MT-Newswatcher has very similar behavior with newsgroups. It will get a count of all the messages in my groups, but it is not able to download the message headers. It just sits there trying, then times out.
  
• Outlook Express doesn't work with newsgroups either. It won't even get a list of available groups on the Verizon server, so I can't see if it works beyond that.
  
• However, I believe both Outlook and Newswatcher do work with Microsoft's and Macromedia's news servers.

Again, these things all work fine when booted in OS 9. It's just when I'm in OS X, classic apps seem to only be able to communicate with remote servers for a moment, then time-out.

Is this a bug in OS X (ie, does everyone have this problem) or is there a fix or work-around?


If it's relevant, I have a 400 MHz iMac DV, connecting to Verizon DSL using PPPOE. In OS X, I just set it up in the PPPOE tab in Network. In OS 9, I have to use Verizon's stupid MacPOET software to connect.

[laguila]

I had the same problem with Outlook Express and Newsgroups. I say "had" because I just stopped using OE in favour of Mail and I never went into Newsgroups much.

Another similar problem I had was connecting to Bank of Montreal's secure banking site. They will only support Netscrape 4.x on the Mac and while that works fine booting into OS9, the same site will not load under Classic. I've never found a solution to this problem so I've been forced to do my online banking through Virtual PC. I find it particularly odd that this issue occurs under one virtual machine (Classic) and not another (VPC).

[Toe]

So does everyone have this problem?

Can you communicate with news servers or IMAP servers using calssic apps in OS X 10.1.2?

[edX]

i have had no problems connecting to news servers in classic with hogwasher. there are plenty of osx newsreaders as well and they are getting better and better. try www.macupdate.com and www.versiontracker.com to find em and try em
there are also plenty of osx mail readers. i understand using classic when no osx alternative is present (believe me - hogwasher is still the best newsreader for my tastes) but with mail their are lots of good alternatives and given your choice of newsreader there are several osx equivalents. take the time and make the leap.

[Toe]

Thanks, Ed. I suppose I will try an OS X news reader, but I really do like Newswatcher, and I know an OS X version is coming eventually.

But I'm concerned that this problem might point to a deeper problem in my system... or to a bug in OS X. I would really like to know which one it is....

[Toe]

Well the good news is that MT-Newswatcher for OS X was just released!

The bad news is that I still don't understand what is causing this problem. I'm guessing that OS X only allows Classic to communicate on certain TCP ports. I would further guess that there's a way of allowing additional ports... but I have no idea how.

Can anyone help with this?