Thank you for the info. 

I'll access my backups and see what I can recover otherwise I'll just have to wrack my brains and try and recreate whatever it was I originally noted in the various annotations.   Lesson learned, store nothing too important in the annotations.

Hi,   In one of my message folders there are many messages which have annotations added and the green dot to the left of the message "From" column is showing.  However, when I open the message and select the "Annotations" tab there is no text there.      What may have happened?  Is there an automatic way to re-attach annotations to messages?  Is there some way of manually re-attaching annotations to their parent messages?     Any help appreciated.

I also have a lot of annotation .PMN  files in my folder ( ~2000)  and it may be that some of these are orphans or otherwise of no further value.  Is there a way of cleaning up the .PMN files and de-cluttering my drive?  Again, any help appreciated

Alan

 WinPMail version: Version 4.70 (Win32), Feb 27 2014, build ID 546

Win7 32bit

IIRC, a reindex will break the association of the annotation with its message.  AFAIK, there isn't a way to re-associate.

According to Han's Guide to Filenames and Extensions, annotations "are associated with their relevant messages by the message id, with the first character of the filename being replaced with an A".  Most of my .PMN files do not begin with an "A" so this behavior must have changed at some point.  Regardless,  I don't know of a way to identify whether the message exists for any given .PMN.  FWIW, they're plain text files.

There was an extensive discussion about the limitations of annotations awhile ago but the search capabilities of the forum appear broken (only going back about 6 weeks) so I can't point you to it.  It was determined that annotations should not to be relied on for anything important.

Below is text from a recent message from David Harris regarding naming of annotation files.

"... Hmm. Things have changed somewhat. I had completely forgotten that I did
this, but it turns out Pegasus Mail now creates the filename for the .PMN
file by creating an MD5 hash of the containing folder's unique ID, the message's
unique ID, and a rendering of the message date. The idea was to create a
filename that would never collide between messages in different folders,
and as such it will work, but there is absolutely no way of back-forming the
identity of the parent message.

You'll probably still have some old-style annotations there too - these
are simply the original .CNM filename (stored in the X-PMFLAGS header even in
folders) with the .CNM stripped and .PMN appended. These will still work, but there
is a much higher chance of filename collision with them. You can distinguish
between the two because the "new style" annotations will have much longer
filenames..."

Martin.

[quote user="irelam"]You'll probably still have some old-style annotations there too - these

are simply the original .CNM filename (stored in the X-PMFLAGS header even in
folders) with the .CNM stripped and .PMN appended. These will still work, but there
is a much higher chance of filename collision with them. You can distinguish
between the two because the "new style" annotations will have much longer
filenames..."[/quote]

That's consistent with and explains what I saw in my files.   I wonder if that change was meant to make them more durable (the association to the message couldn't be broked so easily).