There is a message in one of our inboxes…

What “inboxes”? What kind of e-mail client is it?

We cannot read the message without the error:

You get an error on your AS/400 when you try to read the e-mail? Again, what kind of e-mail client is it?

The errors you posted aren’t helpful. They refer to programs and files on your system. They are not common programs. We can’t look at them — only you can look at your programs.

If you want us to look at your error messages, you need to give us useful information about them. Most especially, what are the message identifiers? What programs sent the messages? What programs were the messages sent to? What kind of job did the messages appear in? What is the job supposed to do?

Is this some kind of web e-mail client? What product is it?

Tom

From what you’ve posted, I’d suspect the program WEB002RCL is mishandling the display file WEB002D. If possible, take the D option on the messages and review the output. Don’t forget to list the job log – between the messages there and the information from the dump output you should be able to isolate the problem.

Permanent I/O error occurred in file WEB002D (C G D F). D

I agree that WEB002RCL has trouble with file WEB002D and that it’s likely a display file. But note that reply ‘D’ is already shown as having been taken. If a dump has already been prepared and if parts of messages from a screen are all that’s available, then some dialog needs to happen before we can narrow down possible causes.

Tom

After I check X to view the message the before mentioned errors come up with an option to “reply” which I can’t type anything more than one leter long into. After I exit it takes me out of the web messages menu and displays this:

“Function check. CEE9901 unmonitored by WEB002RCL at statement 600, instructi”

…an option to “reply”

That would be the ‘reply’ that you send to the error function. Those errors each present a list of possible replies, e.g., “(C D I R)” indicates that can reply to the error with one of four possible replies. If you reply with:

• C — the function will be ‘C’ancelled.
• D — the function will be ‘D’umped.
• I — the error willbe ‘I’gnored.
• R — the operation that found the error will be ‘R’etried (and the error will probably happen again).

It seems likely that some content of the message is incorrect. For example, it might be corrupted in a way that causes data to be sent to your screen that isn’t text. Your screen (or your window on your screen) is only capable of displaying text data. If a program tries to send binary data to that screen (or window), the system will signal an error back to the program. The error will be something like “Permanent I/O error…” and the program that ran into error is probably named ‘WEB002RCL’.

Your replies to those error messages are restricted to single letters because the errors are fundamental, at a very basic level that the program wasn’t written to handle. It’s not a very good recommendation for the program.

Under various conditions, there might be default replies sent to the error messages. If you are stuck having to type the replies, about the only two that you should use are ‘C’ and ‘D’.

‘C’ will cancel the program operation that is currently running. A likely result is that a higher level program will see another error. The higher level program will be the program that called the one that ran into the original error. The higher level program will get a signal that the program it called was cancelled.

If the higher level program can’t handle the fact that a program that it called was cancelled, then the system will send the error to you. The system will want to know what to do about the higher level program. Your reply might cause an even higher level program to get an error signal, and so on until the series works back out to wherever it started.

‘D’ will cause the program to format and print a dump of the variables in the program’s memory. Once that has been printed, things continue in the same way that a cancel would continue. A dump is possibly only useful to the programmer who wrote the program. (Any dump probably wasn’t actually printed. It’s probably been sent to an output queue, waiting for someone to look at it.)

Is this a product that someone installed on your system? Or does your company have programmers who wrote these programs?

The names are suspicious. “WEB002RCL” sure seems to be some kind of web-mail function. I suppose that there is a possibility that that e-mail item is only valid when you read it through a browser or an appropriate PC e-mail program. Text-based e-mail is fine for terminal screens, but graphics, sound files and Flash presentations require an appropriate e-mail program.

If the e-mail is formatted properly, it should be possible to display and read the text portions without running into any errors from non-text portions. But a lot of programs that create e-mail don’t do it correctly, and a lot of programs that read e-mail also don’t do that correctly. A poorly formed e-mail that is read by a weak e-mail client can result in errors like what you are seeing.

Can you tell us anything about the e-mail product that you are using? Is there a name displayed anywhere? Do you use a menu or a command to get into the product? Any hints might be big helps.

Tom