I have been using Pegasus Mail since the 1990s. I occasionally have had the odd issue, but I am now suffering an issue which may lead me to have to consider an alternative.

The issue is a frequent loss of the Mail Directory Structure, whereby Filing Trays are deleted, and message folders and many messages are dumped into the root of the structure, and some messages appear to be lost.

I am running V4.8, not having become aware of 4.91 although I do check quite regularly.

Is there any advice on offer,
A. To best correct this situation, and
B. To recover missing messages?

In hope,

Kenneth A. Spencer

The Folder list tray structure is a virtual structure whose records are stored in a file named HIERARCH.PM. When HIERARCH.PM gets corrupted, a new one is created by polling each folder file in the mailbox directory. Unfortunately, the mailbox files do maintain a record of any parent Tray they might have been in. The recovery method is to restore HIERARCH.PM from a recent backup. This may not work if the backup is too old. Do the restoration with Pegasus Mail closed.

A corrupted HIERARCH.PM will not result in any missing messages. The resulting rebuild can result in duplicate named folders not being displayed in the Folder list. If that is not it, post back with more specifics about the missing messages.

Best practices to prevent issues with HIERARCH.PM corruption included:

• Exclude the mailbox directory from active scanning by an anti-virus/anti-malware product.
• Never run two instances of Pegasus Mail that access the same mailbox.
• Backup regularly
• Use unique folder names. I practice I followed and encouraged all of my users to follow was to prefix the name of every nested folder with something the identified its parent Tray (eg: Tray name: "Accounting", Subfolder names prefixed with "Acc-"). This way, if an event resulted in being unable to restore HIERARCH.PM, then the folders would be sorted in the Folder list in a way that would group them by the parent Tray they had been in. Also, it helps minimize duplicate folder names.

Note: An abend during shutdown or an abrupt shutdown due to a power outage are unavoidable events that might result in a corrupted HIERARCH.PM.