Glad to help. Let us know what you find out, please.  -- Wyatt

I'm new to Pegasus, so please excuse me if this is a dumb question. 

In my address book I have two entries for each of several people who have two e-mail addresses.  I'm trying to use the "key" field so I can distinguish between the two when I create a new message and click on the book icon at the right end of the "To" field.  In the address book I enter characters in the "key" field, but sometimes those characters seem to disappear, or they're there and then they're gone, or I see them when editing the address book but not when I use the address book.  It seems to me that Pegasus is erratic in its behavior.  When I tried to address a message today I saw three, not two, entries for one person, and only two of the three had characters in the "key" field.  So I edited the address book and deleted the one that had no "key" entry;  then I found that two of the three had been deleted. Sometimes I can see the characters in the "key" field if I edit the address book, but it appears to be empty when I use the address book in a new message.

I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.

Thanks in advance for your advice.

SteveS, it sounds like two things are going on: the address autocompletion and the addressbook indexing.

 I don't have a clue why the characters are appearing intermittently, unless it's related to the corruption discussed below.

 I don't use the addressbook as you do (I autocomplete only from the Recently Used list, populated with my most-used addresses and marked as read-only), but I don't think you can use the Key field as you intend. It is mostly for ordering the addressbook, and I use it only for sorting an exported, hard copy of my addresses. I think what you are trying to do is Aliasing, which is described in the Help and Manual as using the Name fields as a shortcut to the email address. It can be turned on or off through the Addressbook menu, accessed when the Addressing Center is open, then select Addressbook/Addressbook Properties to select how aliases are used. I recall that others have said this feature is not foolproof: if you have duplicate names, an alias might not resolve as you expect, and it's not always clear which of several addressbooks get searched to resolve the alias. As one person said, be careful with aliases when you send love letters!

 The duplicate addressbook entries are often due to a corrupt addressbook index file. Deleting what looks like an errant entry will instead delete one or more good entries. The solution is to choose an easily re-entered addressbook entry and delete it, then close the addressbook and close and reopen WinPMail. This forces a reindex of the addressbook, which usually corrects the problem and you can re-enter that one entry. Some of us have put a dummy address at the head of the addressbook for just this purpose (but I don't think anyone has tested whether /adding/ an address would work as well).

 If that doesn't work, you have a badly corrupted addressbook data file and you'll have to rebuild it. Close WinPMail and back up any *.pmr and *.pm! files (addressbook data and index pairs, found in your mail/user folder unless they are systemwide addressbooks; you should be able to read them with a text editor to identify the one you want, if you have more than one). Get a copy of pmimport.exe and use it to export the pmr file so you can rebuild a new pmr/pm! pair. Then you can import those into WinPMail. A forum thread for Address Book from 5/21/07 and the message below (from the listserve archive) discuss details:

Hello!

Les Grant wrote:
("Corrupt address file index", 22 Sep 2004)

> I have somehow managed to corrupt my address book index file. The
> address book file looks ok. Symptoms are a number of duplicate entries
> that actually point to other unrelated email addresses. Is there a way
> to re-build the index? I have solved the problem by restoring from a
> backup (as we all do!) but I couldn't find a re- index option.

A corruption like this may happen if you close Pegasus Mail while an
addressbook is still open (however, there may be some other possible
reasons as well).

There is no internal re-index option as far as the addressbooks are
concerned AFAIK. If you want to use an external program to re-index an
addressbook, you may be interested in what Thomas Easton has reported to
the list:

***Thomas' hint***
Date:    Sun, 13 Jun 2004 08:36:31 -0400
From:    Thomas Easton
Subject: Re: Disappearing Addressbook Entries

> Not sure how this happened. But as I was adding a new address entry in
> my addressbook under Pegasus 4.21a, I lost all but 4 address entries.
> What might have caused this problem, and is there any way to recover
> the lost entries? I have an old backup which does not have some of the
> more recent changes in my addressbook.

First thing I'd do is use Windows Explorer to locate any *.PMR files in
your home mailbox location and make backup copies (addressbooks in
WinPMail consist of a PMR data file and a PM! index file.)

If you're seeing only 4 addressbook entries and if the size of the PMR
file is only about 2,000 bytes then the data is likely lost. Otherwise
there might just be a problem in the PM! index. Start Pegasus Mail, open
the addressbook and delete one entry, one that you can easily
reconstruct. This should force a rewrite of the index and may restore
the "invisible" entries.

If that does not help, then you can reconstruct the index from the PMR
data using the pmimport.exe utility. It's only available in the Pegasus
Mail for DOS 3.50, downloadable from
[now at www.pmail.com/downloads_maine_t.htm] It's a DOS command line
utility, run from a command prompt window. Do pmimport /? to see params,
e.g. ~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~
C:\PMAIL\MAIL\tom>pmimport /?

PMIMPORT: batch usage -

      PMIMPORT /i textfile addressbook
   or PMIMPORT /e textfile addressbook
~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~

First you'd export using the /e option to generate the textfile, then
with the  /i option to regenerate the addressbook PMR and PM! files,
which can be copied back to your Pegasus Mail installation.

Do run pmimport against another, separate copy of the PMR file, because
if you get the syntax wrong you can wipe out the PMR data with no
warning. ******

Thankyou, Thomas E.! Perhaps, this helps you, Les.


Yours,
Thomas Nimmesgern

good luck -- Wyatt

Wyatt -

   Thanks for your comments.  You've given me an idea, which I have not yet fully tested:  if I click   Book > reindexAddrBook   after each time I enter a key field, it may be that I will avoid this mysterious behavior.

           Thanks,

                  Steve