Pegasus Mail & Mercury

I have just lost my folder hierarchy - again.  This time it followed a WinXp crash - this is due to a faulty video card that should be replaced tomorrow(!).  Fortunately I had mad a copy of hierarch.pm and have loaded that.

 

Is there anyway that Pegasus may be configured to always make a copy of this file?  My memory is not good enought to always remember to make a copy when I add a new tray / folder.

 

TIA
Dave

To make a backup of hierarch.pm, you could start Pegasus in a batch (.BAT) file.
This is a text file that you can make in Notepad. Save it in the ADMIN folder. Right-click it and change Properties to "Close on Exit".
Make a shortcut to this file, and use it to launch Pegasus.

:: At a minimum it would make one backup as follows.
copy hierarch.pm hierarch.bak1
C:\PMAIL\winpm-32.exe -A

(Change C:\PMAIL if your installed location differs. I use the -A switch, yours may be different - check the properties of your launch shortcut).

(You would have to be super careful that you did not try starting Pegasus a second time before fixing, as your good backup would be overwritten....
:: So this could be extended to make three backup versions as follows.
if exist hierarch.bak3 del hierarch.bak3
if exist hierarch.bak2 ren hierarch.bak2 hierarch.bak3
if exist hierarch.bak1 ren hierarch.bak1 hierarch.bak2
copy hierarch.pm hierarch.bak1
C:\PMAIL\winpm-32.exe -A

In fact, after knowing about this sort of thing for *many* years, I will now start Pegasus this way.

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Want to fix the Climate Change "problem"? Disband the UN.

rossnixon:

Hi all,
Most of my pmail installation (v4.41) is working fine. But I have two "folder trays" (yellow icon) with no visible messages. One is a subfolder of the other.
These are remnants from another HDD after it suffered some corruption.

When I try to delete these, I get "You have asked to delete a tray file which still contains folders. Please delete or move all folders from the tray before attempting to delete it."
I assume I have to get rid of something from hierarch.pm (mine has 669 lines, many of which are probably invalid/obsolete).

Any hints appreciated.

Cheers,
Ross
 

I take it you're talking about "filing trays." Did you make sure the tray you want to delete is Open (right click on it) and that there is nothing in it? 

--pbm

 

Ross,

 

Many thanks for this - I will certainly use a batch file along the lines you suggest  if there is no way of configuring Pegasus to make its own backups.  I certainly have not been able to find anyway of doing this.

One query I would have is why do you say ADMIN folder?  I would tend to store it in the mail folder to which it refers as I back that folder up to a NAS every night (when at home).  This way my hierarch copies would be in the folder they are needed.

 

Have just tried your suggestion of "close on exit" on another batch file but do not seem to be able to find the box to tick / untick.  What have I missed?

 

Thanks again for suggestion.

Dave 

Dewcal:

I have just lost my folder hierarchy - again.  This time it followed a WinXp crash - this is due to a faulty video card that should be replaced tomorrow(!).  Fortunately I had mad a copy of hierarch.pm and have loaded that.

Just because you have a Windows crash it does not follow that you will lose your folder hierarchy. In fact, losing your folder hierarchy should be nearly impossible - the only time it could happen would be if something deleted the copy of the HIERARCH.PM file on disk, followed by the system crashing before Pegasus Mail rewrote it on exit.

I am *really* struggling with these reports. I do not know what it is that seems to cause these problems for a subset of my user community. As I have remarked elsewhere, there is a lot of very protective, paranoid code in Pegasus Mail for maintaining HIERARCH.PM, and I tend to assume the worst about any situation where I'm manipulating it. It should be *very difficult* to lose your folder hierarchy outright like this and any time I hear of reports like this it makes me tear my hair out in frustration.

There should not be a *need* to backup HIERARCH.PM. It should just not be necessary.

If anyone can give me a reproducible scenario that leads to loss of hierarchy, *please* report it either here or to me directly. I'm happy to fix an explicit problem, but I can't go chasing ghosts: I have to have something tangible to work with.

I apologize if this posting sounds frustrated - that's because it is. There seems to be a problem here, but I can't understand it, and that drives me crazy.



Cheers!

-- David --

Dewcal:

One query I would have is why do you say ADMIN folder?  I would tend to store it in the mail folder to which it refers as I back that folder up to a NAS every night (when at home).  This way my hierarch copies would be in the folder they are needed.

The ADMIN folder is where my mail is stored. I forgot that there would be variations. Just change this to wherever you mail files and hierarch file are kept.
The "Close on Exit" for batch files is on Windows 98 - it will probably be actioned a little differently on XP.

And just to set David's mind more at ease, my first post that started this thread referred to some minor corruption in the hierarch file from 2004 that I had ignored until now. I can't remember the last time the file got flattened (non-hierarchised).... it was probably in 2004 also (with a previous version of Pegasus).

P.S. There may be a few more files that you could keep a few versions of. PMAIL.INI for example. I would have to search usenet archives for a more complete list. Or someone here may have a suggestion.
 

 

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Want to fix the Climate Change "problem"? Disband the UN.

David Harris:

Dewcal:

I have just lost my folder hierarchy - again.  This time it followed a WinXp crash - this is due to a faulty video card that should be replaced tomorrow(!).  Fortunately I had mad a copy of hierarch.pm and have loaded that.

Just because you have a Windows crash it does not follow that you will lose your folder hierarchy. In fact, losing your folder hierarchy should be nearly impossible - the only time it could happen would be if something deleted the copy of the HIERARCH.PM file on disk, followed by the system crashing before Pegasus Mail rewrote it on exit.

I am *really* struggling with these reports. I do not know what it is that seems to cause these problems for a subset of my user community. As I have remarked elsewhere, there is a lot of very protective, paranoid code in Pegasus Mail for maintaining HIERARCH.PM, and I tend to assume the worst about any situation where I'm manipulating it. It should be *very difficult* to lose your folder hierarchy outright like this and any time I hear of reports like this it makes me tear my hair out in frustration.

There should not be a *need* to backup HIERARCH.PM. It should just not be necessary.

If anyone can give me a reproducible scenario that leads to loss of hierarchy, *please* report it either here or to me directly. I'm happy to fix an explicit problem, but I can't go chasing ghosts: I have to have something tangible to work with.

I apologize if this posting sounds frustrated - that's because it is. There seems to be a problem here, but I can't understand it, and that drives me crazy.



Cheers!

-- David --

David,

I just wiped out my folder trays -- and my New Mail folder has disappeared in the process -- by doing this:

1. Renaming the hierarch.pm file to hierarch.sav.

2. Copying an older hierarch.pm file into the active c:\pmail\mail folder.

3. Rebooting. (Folder trays gone).

4. Delete the newly copied hieararch.pm file and rename the hierarch.sav back to hierarch.pm.

Voila. The folder trays are gone.

-peter

David (H),

 

The hierarch folder became corrupt when Pegasus was running in the background and my faulty video card caused the whole system to freeze requiring a hard reboot to get it working again. I am afraid that is all the facts that I can give you as to how / when it happens.  The new video card is in place (hence this mail) and, if it lasts as long as the last one, I should be having video problems again in about 6 months!  If that happens, I will see what happens to the hierarchy.

Cheers,

Dave 

David Harris:

Just because you have a Windows crash it does not follow that you will lose your folder hierarchy. In fact, losing your folder hierarchy should be nearly impossible - the only time it could happen would be if something deleted the copy of the HIERARCH.PM file on disk, followed by the system crashing before Pegasus Mail rewrote it on exit.

I am *really* struggling with these reports. I do not know what it is that seems to cause these problems for a subset of my user community. As I have remarked elsewhere, there is a lot of very protective, paranoid code in Pegasus Mail for maintaining HIERARCH.PM, and I tend to assume the worst about any situation where I'm manipulating it. It should be *very difficult* to lose your folder hierarchy outright like this and any time I hear of reports like this it makes me tear my hair out in frustration.

There should not be a *need* to backup HIERARCH.PM. It should just not be necessary.

If anyone can give me a reproducible scenario that leads to loss of hierarchy, *please* report it either here or to me directly. I'm happy to fix an explicit problem, but I can't go chasing ghosts: I have to have something tangible to work with.

I have just restored my wife's HIERARCH.PM after a complete loss of folder structure for her mailbox, and I can describe what she says happened. I don't expect to be able to reproduce it, but it may provide some sort of clue. She started Pegasus, and the computer went all quiet and dark (I think it has an intermittent video or memory fault) and had to be rebooted with the power switch. Then logged in again, started Pegasus, and no folder structure.

Restoring just HIERARCH.PM from yesterday's backup fixed the problem. I'm afraid I don't have a copy of this file from after the crash and before Pegasus Mail was started up. This is Windows XP Home and Pegasus Mail 4.41.

There is a time delay in Windows between an application program writing and closing a file, and Windows writing the file's contents and "metadata" to disk, usually but not always less than one second. For files where flushing to disk is important (for example, because a backup is about to be deleted, so the new version had better be safely recorded first), the Windows function FlushFileBuffers has to be used, perhaps as the last operation before closing the file. You'd get junk in the file after a reboot if it was only partly flushed.

That suggestion may be a load of junk, in which case sorry for the red herring.

Mark. 

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Don't force it! Use a bigger hammer.

It just happened to me too.  Lost all Trays but the folders appear to be present.  Here is what happened:

My computer (WinXP Pro SP2, no auto update) was starting to act strange with other apps., as happens periodically, so I rebooted the machine.  I went through my applications and shut each down first.  I noticed that, as usual, it takes a long time for Pegasus to complete the shut down.  I didn't realize that the Pegasus shut down wasn't complete and shut down windows. During the Windows shut down a dialog box popped up saying that windows was waiting for Pegasus to shut down.  Windows isn't usually kind in this situation and very quickly the dialog box was gone and windows was shut down (not a restart).  When I restarted I also restarted the applications I was using.  One of those was Pegasus.  The next time I looked at Pegasus, the Trays were gone.  I have one about a month old which I will reload and will probably restore most, if not all of the trays.  My question is now, have I lost any emails?  Will the folders that I created since the old .pm file was backed up still show up with their contents?  I guess I'll find out.

 Meanwhile, I will be using the batch file idea to create my own backups from now on.

Steve

 

All you really need to do is restore the hierarch.pm from the backup.  You must not be running WinPMail when you do the restore or it will not work.  You've not lost any mail or folders since that would be unaffected by the bad Windows shutdown.

FWIW, what WinPMail is doing at the time of closing depends a lot on your setup.  It closes all IMAP4 accounts, disconnects any added mailboxes, writes the pmail.ini, state.pmj and hierarch.pm    It could also be deleting the "deleted" messages folder and moving all of the read mail from your new mail folder to the "default" folder.

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Thomas R. Stephenson
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

You are right and thanks for the info.  I hadn't made many changes since the last backup so with the restored hierarchy everything looked pretty good except for one thing.  The folders created since the backup were present, but they were empty.  In this case there wasn't anything of high value lost.  This seems odd to me, though, since I bet those files are still out there somewhere.

Thoughts?

 Steve

The folders created since the backup were present, but they were empty.

Really strange, the PMM/PMI folders should not be affected at all.  If you put a message into a folder it will always be in that folder no matter how the program crashes.  Are you absolutely sure that you do not have folders of the same name in the tray structure?

 

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Thomas R. Stephenson
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team

I am aware of the potential for confusion of filing of emails if there is more than one folder of the same name in different places.  In other words, I've made that mistake before and no, not this time.  It's a folder with a unique name in the system.  This actually happened with two folders in different places created at different times.  They were also populated at the time they were created.  They each held only one email.  The hierarchy.pm file was corrupted several days later.  I haven't noticed any other emails missing but I haven't been looking either.

Thanks for your help,

 Steve

All that I can tell you is that a crash cannot remove mail from a folder.  A folder is a simple file containing a 128 byte header and RFC 2822 ASCII messages.  The crash would have to delete and re-create the PMM file without the message and retain the header and still the index would contain a false pointer.  Now if you were to have some sort of filter operating on the folders on closing this could happen. The loss of the mail in these two folders was not at all related to the crash that causes loss of the hierarch.pm.

 

 

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Thomas R. Stephenson
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Team