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

Hi!

Unfortunately I have, so far, had a very primitive on-line backup program called "TDC Webdisk". When it is uploading Pegasus mail folders to the backup server, it interferes with Pegasus, generating serious errors, especially if Pegasus needs to compress a mail folder where messages have been deleted (=marked for deletion). You can 'pause' the program, BUT suddenly it decides to start again for no obvious reason...! A very shocking experience indeed!
I was moving lots of messages from the "Received mail"-folder to other 'archive-folders', and when Pegasus started compressing the folder it resulted in an error. Strangely enough the error-message-window disappeared again after a short while, so I couldn't read it all, but I exited Pegasus and when I opened it again, I had to re-index the received mail folder. Luckily I have a backup of everything from just before the whole moving/cleaning up operation.
So now I was thinking of investigating what got deleted or moved or copied to other folders, by comparing the total contents of all folders now and in my backup, but I don't know if any program can do that?
Does anyone have any suggestions?

Best regards,
Henrik Rosenø

Hi!

Pegasus Mail requires full read/write access to its files. If you're going to backup any or all of its files and folders you must shutdown Pegasus Mail first. This is the same reason why Pmail also complains about real-time antivirus activity.

It seems you're using some sort of file synching. This is fine as long Pmail is shutdown. You can't use it concurrently to Pmail or you may find your folders indices files corrupt as well as other control files like state.pmj, pmail.ini and dreadful hierarch.pm.

Try to make your Pmail backup in batches. I do daily backups using a free tool from Luis Cobian called Cobian Backup. It makes daily incremental sets that are packed (compressed and encrypted) and then these data sets are then synched to my cloud account. Cobian Backup takes care to have Pmail shutdown prior to initiate backup, and starts it up when it finishes. Tasks can be either scheduled or on demand so it won't interfere or interfere as little as possible to Pmail activity.

[quote user="Euler GERMAN"]

Hi!

Pegasus Mail requires full read/write access to its files. If you're going to backup any or all of its files and folders you must shutdown Pegasus Mail first. This is the same reason why Pmail also complains about real-time antivirus activity.

Try to make your Pmail backup in batches. I do daily backups using a free tool from Luis Cobian called Cobian Backup. ... Cobian Backup takes care to have Pmail shutdown prior to initiate backup, and starts it up when it finishes.
[/quote]

Thanks for your advice. But it doesn't solve the problems this particularly bad-behaving "TDC Webdisk" on-line backup software has already created...!

You

could also use a file comparison tool like WinMerge to compare files but

I don't think this will be of much help because a Pegasus Mail folder

is made up of a pair of files (.pmm & .pmi).  WinMerge would tell you which ones are different but wouldn't be able

to identify differences by message.

If you want to look at the contents of the backup vs.

the existing folder you can restore the backup mailbox directory to a

new directory (not over the existing mailbox directory) and then add

that directory as a mailbox in the folder list.  This will allow you to

look at the contents of the backup as Pegasus Mail would see it.  To add a mailbox or

directory to your folder list choose "Add mailbox to list..." from the

Folders menu.  The Folders menu is dynamic.  This option only appears

when the folder window is active.

activity in the mailbox since the problem occurred then consider

restoring the mailbox directory(ies) from the backup.  If new messages have come in that you wish to maintain, move them all to your New Mail folder.  Each message in the New Mail folder is maintained in the mailbox directory as a .cnm file.  Copy all of the .cnm files to a safe place, restore the mailbox directory, then copy the .cnm files back.  If you decide to restore, make a copy of the mailbox

directory(ies) first, just in case.

[quote user="Henrik Rosenø"][quote user="Euler GERMAN"]

Hi!

Pegasus Mail requires full read/write access to its files. If you're going to backup any or all of its files and folders you must shutdown Pegasus Mail first. This is the same reason why Pmail also complains about real-time antivirus activity.

Try to make your Pmail backup in batches. I do daily backups using a free tool from Luis Cobian called Cobian Backup. ... Cobian Backup takes care to have Pmail shutdown prior to initiate backup, and starts it up when it finishes.
[/quote]

Thanks for your advice. But it doesn't solve the problems this particularly bad-behaving "TDC Webdisk" on-line backup software has already created...!

It seems you have it sorted already — TDC conflicts with Pmail — so when one is running the other must not. On doing otherwise, Pmail folder's index corruption will be the least of your problems. I'm sorry I can't think of anything else. :(