Thank you, David, that's very kind of you. I hope you do get the opportunity to do some documentation of the configuration files (maybe you could delegate this to somebody you trust with the source code?) but I know you have more important projects already in progress.
I solved my immediate problem with a little gawk code that changed all the zeros to ones in the 8th byte (ignoring any non-zero values) for all my users and sites, and visiting the people with oddball values personally and showing them where to set the auto-timezone in their GUI. We're all copacetic now.
When I make a default PMAIL.INI template for my users, I start with a fresh empty H:/PMAIL folder and run the current version of Pegasus, and answer the opening questions with a set of known unambiguous values. Then I replace the occurrences of those values within the newly created configuration files with numbered tags (like this: %1, %2, %3.1, etc.) to create the template files.
When a new user is created, the template files are processed to place the appropriate information in the appropriate places (this is just one of many processes that are necessary to create a new user; we have to provision the phone system, establish 802.1x access policies, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum) using a little script like so:
prepmail.sh homeserver HJSimpson "Homer J. Simpson"
The prepmail script will substitute homeserver for %1, and HJsimpson for %2, and "Homer" for %3.1, and so forth.
I use a single SMTP definition and a single TOOLBAR.PM on each site's homeserver and use symbolic links for each user; that way I can change them in one place and have everyone changed at once.
A new user's password is flagged as pre-expired on the POSIX side, and when that person logs in the first time, they are redirected to a web page (which they can't escape without rebooting) which makes them set a strong password. That password is encrypted and written into the users' IMAP.PM file (it's also entered into LDAP, and some other places, with the appropriate encryption for each place).
It's conceptually elaborate, but there's really very little code that is very easy to maintain, and it saves many man-hours every year as well as making account provisioning painless for users and system administrators.
I have a similar process that lets our sysadmins painlessly change a users' name (usually due to marriage or divorce) and preserves all their files and email intact.
We are neither big enough nor small enough to have people do everything manually.