Thank you for your help; 'tis appreciated.

If someone can help me, I'd appreciate it.

My Pmail 'crashed' the other day. It has happened before, so I was not unduly concerned.

The programme seemed to freeze and I eventually had to just shut down and exit. I immediately made a copy of the "Mail' and 'Programs' folders in the c:\PMAIL directory/folder.

When I next tried to run the programme I got the expected message which suggests that 'another user' may be using the system. The instruction is either to exit the programme or 'continue' at the risk of losing some data. As I say, this has happened to me before when the PC has crashed or, on one or two occasions, when I have tried to send too many Mb of attachments. Previously I have opted to 'continue' and that has been the end of the problem except on one occasion some years ago when I ended up loading a more recent version and overwriting the Mail and Programs folders with whatever I had backed up at the time. That ended the problem.

On this current occasion , however, none of the above has worked. Every time I try and launch the programme, I get the same error message and if I opt for either 'exit' or 'continue' it simply will not allow me to do either. I have accordingly 'uninstalled' and updated the programme to version 4.7. It installed and now launches and runs perfectly and I can again send and receive e-mails.

I then overwrote the 'Mail' and 'Programs' sub-folders, as I have done before, but when I try and run the programme I get the now very recognisable error message and am unable to proceed.

My question is thus: How can I recover into the programme the message and folder information which I backed up earlier (onto an external mass storage device) so that I can carry on working with some of it which is both current and urgently required?

BTW I am running Windows XP.

Thanks in advance,

There is a configuration issue. Try a reinstall and selectively transfer the needed files.

Read this first:

 http://community.pmail.com/forums/thread/36759.aspx

Thank you for this; I fear, however, that I had no joy whatsoever; the message that someone else may be using the folder/programme still persists. I am also not sure which are the 'needed' files and which are not.

And so, I confess that I have committed a crime, being incredibly frustrated; the V4.7 which I loaded afresh works perfectly but my current files, understandably, are simply not there and I cannot get them loaded. So, what I did was as follows:

1) I reloaded my back ups which I made last week (29 July; the date it all fell apart) into the C:/PMAIL folder
2) I loaded V4.6 because it looked a little more familiar to me than V4.7
3) I tried to launch the programmes with no success; the same error message and inability to tell it to 'continue'.
4) I then did what I am sure I should not have. I went into the C:/PMAIL/MAIL folder and decided that I would simply delete, one at a time, each folder dated 29 July and relaunch the PMail programme after each deletion, to see what happened.
5) The most recent file was called MAILBOXP.LCK and had no size; it was registering as 0 bytes. I deleted it and relaunched the PMail with no luck.
6) So I moved to the next most recent file and deleted that. It is called TO29N59Y.CNM and it is 10 655 Kbytes big.
7) Once again, I tried to run the programme. It works perfectly.

So, while I am extremely pleased, I hope that the pleasure will not be too short lived. I think I'm going to stick with V4.6 for a while now; it is a little more comfortably familiar.

Thank you for your interest. I hope I've not committed too serious a crime and frightened the horses too badly.

A CNM file is a new message file, in this case around 10Mb.