Pegasus Mail & Mercury

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
 

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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
 

You can try the following ...

right click on the folder,

- > check consistancy

- > reindex folder

- > recover deleted space.

You can also check the details of the folder on Folder information, by rightclicking on the folder and you can delete the filename mentioned in that folder information. You can alternatively delete the links for the file mentioned in your hierarch.pm

Thanks gfts.
They are "trays", so check/reindex /recover are not options.

I'll try the folder information thing.
If that doesn't work, I'll make a copy of hierarch.pm, then rename the two bad trays, and see what parts of the file get changed. I think there's a program called windiff which makes it easy to compare two text files.

Ross

 

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

Ok, there was no tray information available, so I gave them easy to spot names and used Windiff to see the two lines that needed deleting.
I was a bit worried about the "flags" and hex strings being linked to other parts of the file, but apparently they aren't.
My dud trays are gone, with no apparent problem remaining. 

P.S. While googling I found www.icon.man.ac.uk/support/filestore/exe/readme.txt
which mentions TREECHECK.EXE for analysing hierarch.pm problems. Unfortunately access to the folder is blocked and I couldn't guess the correct filename to download the exe or zip.

Ross
 

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

http://www.icon.man.ac.uk/support/downloads.htm

Here you can find the tool.

 

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Han van den Bogaerde - support@vandenbogaerde.net
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Group.
My own Pegasus Mail related web information:
http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/

I think all those tools were specifically written for the University's Novell setup and are unlikely to work for anyone else.

 

 

Yes I noticed that after posting the link and downloading the tools.

Sorry about that.

 

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Han van den Bogaerde - support@vandenbogaerde.net
Member of Pegasus Mail Support Group.
My own Pegasus Mail related web information:
http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/

It's a shame because they look like a very useful general set of utilities.

 

BTW, Han, thanks for the photo!

 

I have had similar corruption problems with heirarch.pm.  I usually keep a backup so I can replace when necessary, but I would like to suggest to the developer(s) that Pmail create it's own backup anytime a change is about to be written out, it could save alot of trouble.

Barius:

I have had similar corruption problems with heirarch.pm.  I usually keep a backup so I can replace when necessary, but I would like to suggest to the developer(s) that Pmail create it's own backup anytime a change is about to be written out, it could save alot of trouble.

Making HIERARCH.PM even *more* robust is a priority for v5, as is providing a "hierarchy cleanup" facility in the program (for weeding out entries that are no longer used).

In truth, I don't understand why people seem to have trouble with this file - in the thirteen years since mine was created, it has never needed to be rebuilt once, and I've never had a problem. I've repeatedly invested time in adding bulletproofing code to it, to the extent that the code that manages hierarch.pm is now some of the most heavily checked code in the program.

A lot of the problem is that nobody has ever been able to tie down a repeatable situation that leads to the file becoming damaged: in the absence of being able to reproduce a problem, it's staggeringly difficult to fix it.

About the best I can do is tell you that I will look further into it (again), and see if I can deduce any more precautions I might be able to take.

Cheers!

-- David --

Using v4.41, I have just opened up Pegasus to discover that I have lost my complete hierarchy of trays & folders and have several sets of duplicate folders.  Am not aware of anything going wrong with system when last closing down.

 

Anything to avoid this would be appreciated.

Dave 

David, 

Is there an email address to which we could send you samples of corrupt heirarchy files?

Barius:

Is there an email address to which we could send you samples of corrupt heirarchy files?

It's very unlikely it would help me. What I really need to see is a method for generating the corruption - that is, I need to know the circumstances in which it occurs. To date, nobody has been able to give me a reproducible scenario that would allow me to work out what's going wrong.

Cheers!

-- David --

I did document one case where users were over their disk space limit on a Netware server using Mercury/Netware. Mercury would continue to put messages in their inbox because it was not subject to their disk space limits. When the user opened their mailbox they got a warning about being over limit, so they would start to delete messages etc, which caused a race condition -- deleted messages being put in the "Deleted Messages" folder, which tries to grow, but can't because there is no more disk space. They would either then lockup Pegasus or try to quit, leaving Hierarch.pm in an indeterminate / corrupted state -- I think because they tried to delete whole folders.

My suggestion to people when they ran into that was to delete messages with Ctrl-Del, bypassing the "Deleted Messages" folder, or to request more disk space. I tried to keep ahead of it by monitoring disk space usage, but it wasn't always practical.

The few times that I have corrupted heriarch.pm at home was when Pegasus crashed for some reason. Keeping regular backups has saved me from that purgatory.

 -- Alan 

This situation can arise when the tray previously had a child folder that has
been lost but there is still an entry for that folder in HIERARCH.PM typically:-

   0,0,"A4K3U1IK:2BBE:FOL08021","4D364890:Microsnot",Name_Unavailable

   1 2  ----------------- 3 --------------------    --------------- 4 ----------  --------- 5 -------------

The entry has five fields segregated by commas. The first is 0 and the second
can be 0 or 1. The third segment of the third field (FOL08021) is the file name
of the lost folder so if you use a file manager to search for FOL08021.PMM and
it is missing then you can delete the line in HEIRARCH.

Incidentally, although the second segment of field 4 (Microsnot) is probably
the name of the parent tray, as it appears in the Folders Manager window, it
isn't bound to be as it is the name asigned to the tray when it was created: it
is not altered if the tray has been renamed.

Bob