Thanks to both of you, and apologies for the late reply - I was on vacation and away from the machine that has Pegasus installed. Anyway, what I ended up doing was the following - getting the file name for the folder in question and restoring it from my back-up. The tricky part was finding that file - the info re: home mail box location shown in Pegasus simply points to the wrong place, and I suspect this has something to do with the user account control situation in Vista. I eventually found that the current real location of my mail box to be not at C:\Program Files\Pegasus\MAIL\Admin as given by Pegasus, but at C:\Users\MYUSERNAME\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Pegasus\Mail\Admin, where MYUSERNAME is my user name on this machine.

The folder file (FOLsomething.pmm) in the location given by Pegasus has only the old messags, the same name file in that other location, once restored from my back-up, has also the newer messages. I still don't understand how PM operates with these two locations simultaneously, but the fact that I cannot delete or move certain very old (pre 2007) messages from my New Mail Folder certainly has to do with it. I should clean this up some time... 

 Thanks again, and perhaps someone else with a similar problem can benefit from this or contribute more elucidating thoughts...

 Best,

Ulrike

Hello,

I hope one of you knowledgeable folks out there can help me. I use Pegasus Mail 4.41 on a Vista machine, have been using PMail for ever. Yesterday, when shutting down PM, I got an error message about corrupt files, but then PM closed. This morning, I find that the messages in a folder that I had open last night were gone - all messages that are newer than 2005, that is. So I thought that I would try and restore them from my general back-up. Problem: I cannot identify the files to restore. When I look at the files in my Home mail box location (as given in the Help/Info screen of PM) all the files there are dated 2008 and older - but I am using PMail on a daily basis, so there should be files that are much younger. As I am about to go on a trip, my mind may be warped here and I may not be thinking straight - but I simply cannot figure out what to do to restore my messages. Please help if you can!

Thanks,

Ulrike

If you right-click on a folder and select "Folder information", you will discover the filename of the folder. There are two files with the same name but different extensions: one is xxxxxx.pmm and the other is xxxxxx.pmi and both together make up the folder so copy both across from your backup.

You might try to reindex the folder before restoring from a backup. This is also available from the right-click menu.

Finally, be sure to backup your current state before you fiddle with it. Clearly you're good at doing that regularly anyway but we try to remind people all the time!

> I hope one of you knowledgeable folks out there can help me. I use Pegasus Mail 4.41 on a Vista machine, have been using PMail for ever.
> Yesterday, when shutting down PM, I got an error message about corrupt files, but then PM closed. This morning, I find that the messages in a
> folder that I had open last night were gone - all messages that are newer than 2005, that is. So I thought that I would try and restore
> them from my general back-up. Problem: I cannot identify the files to restore. When I look at the files in my Home mail box location (as
> given in the Help/Info screen of PM) all the files there are dated 2008 and older - but I am using PMail on a daily basis, so there
> should be files that are much younger. As I am about to go on a trip, my mind may be warped here and I may not be thinking straight - but I
> simply cannot figure out what to do to restore my messages. Please help if you can!

Open the folder data file (*.PMM) in an ASCII editor like notepad and you'll find the display name of the folder.  This will give you the names of the PMM/PMI files to restore.

If the files already exist in your HOME mail directory then the problem is not with the folder but with the folder listing in the hierarch.pm.  If this is true then try  the following procedure.  This has worked for several others to restore the functionality of the  message folders:   

1.  Use Help | About Pegasus Mail | Info to determine your mail
    directory.  Exit Pegasus mail.

2.  Rename the file HIERARCH.PM in your HOME mail directory to
    HIERARCH.SAV.

3.  Run WinPMail.  Your HIERARCH.PM will be re-created and should
    start working correctly.

Note:  This will delete any tray structure you have created and it
           will have to be recreated.  The process will not affect any
           mail of mail folders you have, it only affects the display of
           the folders.