Pegasus looks to a file named PMAIL.USR for user information.  This file is located in the root \MAIL directory.  In a default installation this would be C:\PMAIL\MAIL.  One possibility for your problem is that something has happened to this file or Pegasus Mail can't find it.  This could happen if you have the mailboxes located in a remote location and the PC has lost that connection.

See if you can view the contents of the PMAIL.USR file with a text editor.  Each user should be listed in the following format:

      U;username;Personal Name OR A;username;Personal Name

The "U" indicates a normal user, the "A" indicates an administrator.

If you can then look at the directory structure of you \MAIL directory.   The subdirectory names should be the same as the usernames of the users.  These the user mailbox directories.  One should exist for each entry in the PMAIL.USR file.

If all looks good than the PMAILCFG file may have gotten corrupted.  This file tells Pegasus Mail where the mailbox directories reside.  It is located in the directory where the Pegasus Mail executable files are located (default is C:\PMAIL\PROGRAMS).  This file is not editable with a text editor so I suggest a restore from a backup.  If a backup is not available then a reset using the PCONFIG.EXE utility is the next option.  PCONFIG.EXE is a 32 bit DOS app.  Usage is dependent on a 32 bit OS or a DOS emulation app like DOSBOX.  If you need to use PCONFIG it would be worthwhile to do a search in this forum on "PCONFIG".

Indeed, and I am just scratching the surface. I will likley have more questions unrelated to this topic, for which I will post new topics. For now, I have set up two Pmail folders, each on a different drive. Each will be limited to one host. Once I better understand identies, mailboxes, etc., I will then combine them and perhaps have more questions related to this topic. Thanks to all.

[quote user="Madsam"]When I view within the e-mail message in preview mode, and switch to the attachment (F7), it only shows "e-mail message > Plain Text." Any ideas how to extract that image out?[/quote]

Assuming you're referring to an HTML message (which you rather likely do, otherwise it wouldn't display an image) and if you use IERenderer (the default HTML renderer) do a right-click on the image and select Copy image to clipboard from the context menu which allows you to paste it into your favourite image editor to do whatever you want with it.

None of that nor any other idea will do any good  .  .  it seems the Mail folder I saved had mail in it from about 5 - 7 years ago, not any of the most recent.  Do not know where the most recent was saved, every thing was supposed to have been on that Micro Mini Chip.  That is what was moved and saved.

BFluet,

Thank you for the assistance all you gave me to do went well , except where I screwed it into a deep dark bottomless pit.  This is my clue to stop trying to learn more and learn to live with what I have before that is gone.

This has nothing to do with Pegasus Mail or your forums, This is due to my getting to be too old to do what I want, now is my time to do what is needed.  This is one time you cannot do anything about it, because; I am the cause of what has happened.

Thank you so very much for your patience and assistance

Thank you for your patience Guy.

Yes, I now see that option.

I am beginning to think that I should leave well alone and just stick to Yahoo mail.  

While I'm sure that Pegasus is fine, I don't know that it offers me any benefits.  I had seen its praises sung and thought I would investigate.

Regards.

Win7 default user profile/permissions should be ok for c:\pmail and all files below. On all my win7 machines it was not necessary to change from default.

What would be or will be problem is if you had old setttings and preferences found. Did you use, copy, import anything from a former install or another machine with different OS version? You don't want any old pmail.cfg or any old pmail.ini file to be found but it is ok to import old data files only.

http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/pf_pmfiles.html
is reference for Pegasus Mail files and locations and descriptions of function.

Was this a new clean install to the win7 machine? What is the commandline being used to start program now? Is it something like c:\pmail\programs\winpm-32 -a -roam -I Admin

where Admin is the default username created by installer. 

I can't swear, but I guess this is a Pmail thing. I do use Cobian Backup but never used its shadow copy facility. It needs .Net framework which I'm not willing to run on my machines. So, making long story short, I never used this feature and have no plans to do so.

What I think may be the cause of your problems is synching Pmail files. Pmail files are in constant change and each of them entitles a file to be synched to host. For example, a 2GB folder file (PMM/PMI pair) under synching will produce weird results. It most likely will have a 2GB .PMM file and only a 229KB .PMI index file. For each we have different writing time as well as transfer time. We can also have at backup host, at a given time, an index that do not belong to correspondent folder data. That said, I'm positive cloud synching should be avoided, at least in this scenario.

OTOH backup is different. You shut down the application and save its files to a local or remote repository (Cobian Backup handles this easily). You can save backup locally and then synch its files or transfer backups (full, incremental, or differential) directly to cloud host. This has been working well here for uncountable years. :)

You will find the answer also to Win 8 64 bit in my query on the 12 Dec under Installing PM v 4.63 in Win 8 Pro (64 bit).   It has not been a problem happily!   I have been using the application since 1996.

 Rodney Fry

The HIERARCH.PM file maintains the folder structure.  It is written to

each time you a change in the folder structure and each time you close Pegasus

regardless of whether you made any folder changes.

When you first

add a mailbox to your folder list any existing folder files are read

into HIERARCH.PM.  The structure of any nested folders (folders within

trays) can not be discerned during this process so any folder structure gets flattened.  This sounds like what is happening

to you.  The HIERARCH.PM file relies on unique folder ID's which are

assigned when a folder is created.   The "add mailbox" function is

designed to provide access to a different users mailbox or an archived mail directory so I

wonder if the unique folder ID function does not behave properly when

trying to create a mailbox using the "add mailbox" function.  I say that because a tired folder structure is maintained in my test with another users mailbox added to my folder list.

As

for how the folder structure of added mailboxes is recorded in

HIERARCH.PM, the structure is recorded differently depending on whether

the added mailbox is connected or disconnected at the time Pegasus Mail

is closed.  If connected, the folder structure should be recorded in

HIERARCH.PM based on the unique folder ID and restored when Pegasus Mail

is opened.  If disconnected, the folder ID reference entries are left

in HIERARCH.PM however without an associated folder name.  Pegasus

attempts to use these entries to restore the folder structure the next

time that mailbox is added, again, based on the folder id's.  You might test these actions to see if either one maintains the

structure.  One thing I don't know is how the folder structure is retained if you connect,

modify, disconnect then reconnect an added mailbox during the same

session of Pegasus Mail.

Had you noticed the "Add to Dict" button on spell-checker dialog?

Martin 

[quote user="FJR"]

I suppose FROM and SUBJECT in your example are encoded, because they include non-7bit-characters.

[/quote]

OK. Thank you. 

This is probably the reason why I often cannot find what I am looking for when my search terms contain Danish characters.

- Henrik

Thanks, Brian and Guy.

I found the option to 'Remember and apply each folder's sorting mode separately'.  It was ticked, so I unticked it, thinking that I could then have them all sort by date.  Then I went into one of the folders that was correct (sorting by date), and it was still by date.  I then went into one of the problem folders and it was still by sender, but this time, when I clicked on sort by date, closed it and reopened it, it had kept the sort by date.

The folders now seem to be behaving normally - which I find a bit odd.  I'd expect that, having unchecked the 'remember and apply...' they would now all have the same sorting, but they don't!

Guy - under grouped views each had none (normal view) ticked?

They are now doing what I want them to do, so thank you.

All is good at the web site Today.

OK. Here is the solution I have developed for comparing the total contents of 2 sets of Pegasus mail folders, for instance all your current mail folders and a backup of them!

It's somewhat cumbersome, and I am not sure if it's perfect. Note, that I am comparing the total content of the 2 sets, NOT the content of individual folders, because I am not interested in looking at mails that have simply been moved from one folder to another.

You need:

PmailUnDup (the newest version I was able to find was v. 2.22 - on my own PC).

A text or document compare program like CSDiff (or MS-Word).

A spreadsheet like MS Excel Starter 2010. I tried OpenOffice 3.3 and 3.4, but there is an error in the import-text-files function that makes it very cumbersome, at least with Tab-separated fields.

The DOS commands 'copy' and 'sort'.

First you put the 2 sets of folders in 2 directories. We can call them dir-before and dir-after.

In each of these directories you do the following:

1. Use PmailUnDup to create Tab-separated text-file copies (or maybe CSV-files) of all folders (actually all PMI-files).

(You can use the statistics-function to see the total number of mail messages (and addresses) in the directory.

2. To merge all the text files into one, open the MS DOS command prompt and change the directory to where all these text files are stored. Now issue the command 'copy *.txt target.txt'

3. Import the text file in MS-Excel, but excluding the first 4 columns. Because they contain information that relates to the specific folder the message is from.

3B. Later it turned out that about 10% of all my mail messages had had there size in bytes (fsize - last column) incremented by 1, in the index-folders in the newest set. Very strange! And there were other Pegasus-peculiarities...! To minimize the problem I divided all values in the fsize-column by 10, in both sets, with this Excel formula: "=INT(F2/10)".

4. Save the file as a text-file.

5. Sort all lines (rows) of that text-file alphabetically with an MS-DOS-prompt-command looking more or less like the following:

Sort "target BEFORE fromCol5 fsizeDIV10.txt" /o "Sort output BEFORE.txt"

5B. Maybe you can do the sorting directly in Excel, before saving it, but the DOS-command is very fast.

Now you have 2 alphabetically sorted lists of all your mail from the 2 sets of folders. To compare them and see the differences I suggest you use the free program CSDiff. Choose Options! I suggest "Display line numbers", "Only show changed lines", and Show '1' unchanged line surrounding.

That's it!!

Best regards,

Henrik Rosenø

Thanks. I changed the winsock setting and it works now.

If that is the case then 12 users it is.  There is a way to create a

default user profile (PMDFLTS.INI file) that gets utilized each time a

user is created.  The details are in a Pegasus Mail Network

Administrators Guide that goes back to v3.2 but I suspect the PMDFLTS.INI file will still work today. 

I attempted to check the pmail.com

website to see if this manual is still available for download but the

site appears to be down.  A Google search shows it available here:  ftp://guam.packet.org/admin.pdf

If by "radio button" you mean the "?" box located in the top right corner of some configuration windows (Internet Mail Options window for instance), it does not work.  Each configuration window contains a "Help" button that opens topic specific help for the configuration settings contained in that window. 

As for accessing help when not in a configuration window, the F1 key will open the help file on a topic specific to the active window.  You can do the same thing using the "Help" pull down menu and selecting the "Specific help" option.  Once the help file is open you can browse it by contents or index.

One thing I did for years was to keep a shortcut to the Pegasus Mail manual on my desktop often utilizing the search function of the pdf reader to help find what I was looking for.

First of all thank you for the reply. Now for an update. I got the mail to open by highlighting it and clicking the relevant icon. I don't know why it did not occur to me to try that before posting except that I prefer to open emails with a double click and for whatever reason that was not working. I don't know what a raw view is or how one would see it and I would be interested in learning. As for a message not opening I would think that a minimally competent program would display a verbal message telling in detail why a message will not open and what if anything I can do about it. I have very little patience with a computer or a program that does not explain itself in detail when it does not do what I want. I really do try to be patient with computers because I do not understand them except at the level of an operator of software so I very much admire the people who can design and make hardware and software. But my first computer as far as I remember never balked on me without giving me an unmistakable indication of what was wrong and what I could do about it. The fact that I had to restart it at least every hour and a half did not keep it from being in my memory much better than any I have had since.

Good that you got it sorted. The OLD file should be a backup of the PMAIL.INI file from the time when Pegasus was upgraded. The timestamp of the PMAIL.INI file is updated at the end of each Pegasus run.

^^^^  Like he said!

 Just found and quickly solved a connection issue to my host provider's servers. All it took was an upgrade to version 4.70. So I made a donation to help fund ongoing development, and I encourage other users to do the same!