Hello, esteemed BulkMail2 development team -

Thank you for the fine coding work you have done on BulkMail2; the single-screen listing of the contents of the inbox is especially well done, kudos.

I derive the bulk of my income from the auction house, leaning towards high-value items to maximize my income per hour. Blizzard's choice of running auction house income through the mail, rather than simply adding it to my bank account, wastes a lot of time. Additionally, the short 2-day maximum auction (on a game that has huge swings in price and availability through the 7-day week) creates a lot of failed auctions. These factors combine to create a staggering amount of WoW-mail, hundreds per day.

Clicking through these hundreds of WoW-mails is unthinkable. In a game that is after all supposed to be fun, designing the main repository of the auction house to be so incredibly tedious seems, to me, nothing less than cruel. However, BulkMail2 mitigates this tedium. Thank you very much. So far, so good.

I noticed that I get a number of "Item was not found" errors ever time I use the take all function of BulkMail2. I found this explanation of the error in WoW's official knowledge base:

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"Unfortunately there is currently an issue with the in-game mail system. I will describe it below, as well as provide the workaround.

"Issue
When attempting to retrieve an item out of the in-game mail system a character will recieve an 'Internal Mail Database Error' and 'The item was not found'.

"DO NOT DELETE THE MAIL. We will be unable to restore any mail deleted due to this issue, as the items are retrievable.

"Workaround
    * Attempting to retrieve the item attached to the in-game mail.
    * After receiving the above mentioned message close the World of Warcraft.
    * Log back on to the World of Warcraft and the attached items should shortly appear in the inventory of your character.

"Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused due to this issue, we are looking into the underlying cause. In the meantime please follow these steps, and note that the items are not lost."
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I carefully audited the contents of the WoW-mails and found that each of those "Item was not found" errors did indeed represent a lost item or sum of gold. The audit revealed that several thousand gold evaporated in this fashion, including 120 of bars of hardened adamantite.

I examined the lua's associated with BulkMail2 and found a couple of areas that can be strengthened to reduce or avoid this problem.

Latency between the player 's computer and the Blizzard servers could account for an item not being present when the process loops around to take the next item. A possible solution would be to add a delay of at half a second or a full second to prevent the latency from being an issue.

Also, the code does not check for errors before attempting to take an item. In particular, if an item of mail generates "The item was not found" you should not
    "elseif hasItem then TakeInboxItem(index, attachment) end"
because the item will not be found and the WoW-mail will be lost. You might try adding
    "if not ERR_ITEM_NOT_FOUND then"
or verify there is actually an attachment to take with something like
    "GetInboxNumItems() > 0"

Anyway I hope this was helpful. Send me an email through this site or to fynants at yahoo dot com if you would like some help with this problem. I might patch my own code, and if I do you are welcome to the code.

Again, thank you for your good work.

Warmest regards,
Dolf, GM of Super Ninja Death Squad on Arygos