Thanks for the feedback on NotSplit. I will arrange for an update to be put on Community shortly to deal with "self".

Martin 

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I have a large Pegasus Mail installation going back over ten

years and with over 300 mail folders.

One folder, which stores several hundred messages, cannot be

accessed. Immediately after opening it causes a Windows error message  ‘Pegasus for Windows has encountered a

problem and must close’.

I have determined the name of the *.pmm file concerned and

tried replacing this with a backup, but this doesn’t solve the problem.

Is there likely to be a way of fixing this or at least recovering the

messages to a new folder?

I’m using Windows XP SP3 and Pegasus Mail 4.63 build 325.

Any

suggestions will be very gratefully  received.

In the Add-on > Tools and Utilities section of the Community Downloads are two utilities you might find useful. 

MBXMAINTAIN - This tool can be used on mail folders in Pegasus or Mercury/32 for

checking a folder, compressing it, or repair it if it is damaged.  BTW, this utility is part of the v4.63 installation.  You will find it the PMAIL executables directory.

NOTSPLIT - Splits a folder back into individual messages.  You would do this to a Windows directory, add that directory as an added mailbox, then manipulate the messages as needed within PMail (e.g. move to a new folder).

Many thanks Brian!

That looks hopeful and I'll give it a try after I've made a full backup in the morning.

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Been an interesting morning!

Using MXBMAINT I got the following results.

CHECK: there was a *.cnm file

with a duplicate name

FIX IDs: fixed this.

Trying to open the problem folder still produced the Windows

error

REPAIR: produced the following

report:

Repairing folder ''...

#072 Could not open the specified

folder master file.

#074 Unable to proceed with

rebuild operation.

** Errors occurred while

repairing the folder.

So I tried NOTSPLIT. This told me that it had processed 417

files, but in fact when I checked in my ..\local settings\temp folder I found

1112 *.cnm files.

Looking at one or two of these in Notepad, I noticed that

the initial character in each file was missing ie: “nvelope-to: …” and not “Envelope-to:

…” I tried copying one of these into my current mailbox folder in windows and the

message opened fine in Pegasus anyway.

So

is there any reason why I shouldn’t copy all the *.cnm files recovered by

NOTSPLIT into the Windows mailbox folder, open Pegasus, and dump all the

messages that were originally in the problem folder into a newly created folder? Or are

all those missing initial characters going to lead to problems?

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is there any reason why I shouldn’t copy all the *.cnm files recovered by

NOTSPLIT into the Windows mailbox folder, open Pegasus, and dump all the

messages that were originally in the problem folder into a newly created folder? Or are

all those missing initial characters going to lead to problems?[/quote]

This would put them all into your New Mail folder which is fine if that works for you.  I keep a couple hundred messages in my New Mail folder that I want available for quick reference or are pending more information before I respond so adding the recovered .cnm files to it would not work for me.  Instead I would move all of the .cnm files to a directory of there own directory like C:\RECOVER, add that directory as an added mailbox, then copy them to a new PMAIL folder.  As for the missing initial characters, I don't have an answer for that.  Martin, the developer of NOTSPLIT, is active on this forum so may have an answer for you.

Hi there,

     I have not seen any sign of dropped characters before, and not heard of any such problem from Community members.  I would suggest you load everything you got recovered in your inbox to a new folder.  The reason for the difference in counts of records is that the index file contains entries for all the "active" messages. Deletion of messages only causes the index file to remove entries. The difference is that NotSplit, only reads the main *.PMM file, which includes messages that have been "deleted".  As also mentioned in the (limited) documentation for Notsplit, the other flags are not maintained, ie the flag that says message has been replied to, will not be there as it is only held in the index file. 

As an aside, re-building a folder using NotSplit, does the same thing as the Pegasus Mail "re-index" function, but does not create a new index. For Notsplit recovered messages, these are automatically re-indexed when a new index is built by Pegasus Mail.

HTH

Martin 

Brian and Martin

Very many thanks to you both.

Recovering

the files didn’t work out as I expected with a number of problem. I want to go

back to square one and try the whole procedure through again in case I did

something daft, but unfortunately I won’t be able to look at this until

tomorrow afternoon.

Brian and Martin

 The NOSPLIT recovery folder was certainly fine as an emergency

salvage job, and a real lifesaver, but with one problem. All the copies of

my sent messages simply had ‘Self’ in the ‘From’ column, so the only way to

tell who they were sent to was to open them. Presumably that’s what Martin

meant by ‘other flags are not maintained’. Not by any means a fatal problem but

as I tend to be slow replying to emails a bit inconvenient as a reply might be

a long way away from the message received.

I double-checked the missing dropped character problem and

confirmed it. Could it be that I had mangled the *.pmm file by using

MXBMAINT/REPAIR on it before I used NOSPLIT?

In the end I did a quick install of Pegasus on an old

laptop, copied the problematic *.PMI and *.PMM files to the New Mail box and

the folder opened perfectly, so I added that mail box to my proper installation

on the other computer, created a new folder and copied the messages across. All

is now well and, after seeing that Windows ‘Must quit’ message box more times

than I care to remember during the last few days, deleted the old folder with

considerable joy.

I’m trying not to even think about why that worked!

Very

many thanks to both as without the help and encouragement I’d probably have

given up, and that folder actually contained over a thousand messages some of

which I do need access to.