Well, if you set up Autofiltering, you really need to know which folders have which settings applied. If you have that many folders that you cannot find messages even when you have configured something like Autofiltering, then, as you say, you are going to have to go through the entire message store and file them manually.

There is clearly a max number of emails the "new mail" folder can hold, probably between 700-1000, anybody know what it is?

There is no maximum number of records for the new mail folder but there is a limit above which the entries in new mail folder are not automatically updated when new messages arrive.  This limit is somewhere above 700 but I don't know that anyone has identified a specific number.

Practically speaking, keeping this many messages in the new mail folder has a performance cost because every one of those messages is an individual files which gets polled each time the new mail folder is opened.  This is also when new mail filtering is done so the attribute of each one of these messages gets looked at to see if it is a candidate for filtering.  All unread messages get processed through new mail filters.  The best practice is to use the Main folder as the working folder and the new mail folder for new mail only.

Thanks Brian, will tell SWMBO to get filing :-)

I currently have 6972 new mails... Oops. And that's after getting it down from well over 7000. It's always a battle for me, these days newsletters and crap pile in faster than I can read them. I unsubscribe, but every single thing you do online today seems to generate more mail! While I would like to move all newsletters say, or just older mails to an array of main folders (and do every few years), it is much more convenient to have the current ones in the new mail 'folder' (I also went through a stage some years back of regularly hitting the (sub)folder limit of around 64K messages, for different reasons - getting joe-jobbed). Most of the 7000 only go a year and a half back. Yes I do technically need to deal with them, if not reply to them all, some are just communication chains with clients that have escaped the filtering etc. I have an array of filters (probably around a hundred) that file them away once they're read or not coloured. I also have a few filters which run on opening / new messages.

Performance has always been a limitation in this 'mode', but not of filters ironically. They run reasonably fast. It's the opening of the inbox (ie the whole program) which can grind, and it locks up the system due to the 7000-odd file opens it has to do (not saying it's Pmail's fault that I have 7000 newmails...). An i7 machine made a difference, as did 4GB+ of RAM for caching. Another thing that made a huge difference was as SSD, for obvious reasons. But that has allowed me to become lazy and tolerate there being 7000 new mails, when with a magnetic drive anything over 1000 was painful. If Pmail is open and active, the New mail folder does update automatically. But if it doesn't have focus, you have to click on the green new mail icon to have new mails (and filtering) appear. No dramas there.

Not complaining, the system works well for me. And I can report that v4.63 is robust in that respect. But I have often wondered if there is some way of filing emails by sender / thread, without having to set up rules (eg anything to/from a certain domain or alias goes into a folder), somewhat like Opera M2 (if that's what it's called, I've never used it in anger), but using the exact same storage model of Pegasus mail, which is simple and works. I sometimes do lose threads amongst the many folders, but to find them I use a filesystem search, I wrote a "stripper" which goes through the mail database and extracts text, the resulting half a gig of data sits in a folder in the SSD and (just timed it) takes 29 secs to do a raw search using Windows Explorer's native search (I know technically it should be under 3 secs to brute force search, but Windows's F3 is convenient).

Some options you might want to look into...

• Autofiltering
• Folder sort options (eg: sort by thread)
• Folder grouped views (eg: group by thread activity)

[quote user="Brian Fluet"]There is no maximum number of records for the new mail folder but there is a limit above which the entries in new mail folder are not automatically updated when new messages arrive.  This limit is somewhere above 700 but I don't know that anyone has identified a specific number.[/quote]

According to the help [Preferences and settings / General / Advanced settings] it is 750 messages:

If your new mail folder contains more than 750 messages, Pegasus Mail will stop doing automatic updates of the folder for performance reasons, and will check for new mail in your new mail folder less frequently.

 

Some of our staff have had 10,000 messages in their new mail folder and one member of staff had over 12,000. And some of them complained that it took Pegasus Mail a long time to open hahaha :D

Further to my post above...

I recently filed away a couple of thousand messages in a session. It took hours and was possibly not accurate. I used sort by sender and subject to help group them, I've also used thread view and things in the past.

Finding them (as in identifying new mails) isn't the problem though. It's knowing where they go, because there's no system to manage that as far as I know (maybe there is). The folder system is there, the filter function is there, all new mails turn up in the new mail folder so that function is there, but the actual filing is manual (or requires manual set up). I'm not proposing any type of solution here, just an observation that its up to a person's memory where messages are/were filed across 400-odd folders that may stretch back 20 years. That's why I suggested the "by domain" option. I don't know if there is any easy solution, I just know that I'm 'too lazy' to set up a rule and identify a folder for every email or sender that arrives, especially as that setting up of a rule involves searching the entire mail database to remember where that particular mail should go or whether I keep them at all. When I was a spring chicken I could remember all that type of stuff without even thinking about it, the older and greyer I get, the more difficult it becomes!

Haha - I share your pain :) But, I also accept that I am responsible for the filing system I have created. I've been using Pegasus Mail since the late 90's and I have a large number of folders and sub-folders. If I can't recall where I've stored a message I use the Find utility - and that is kept so that I don't need to find the file again. You could use the find utility to search for @domain.com in the headers only and keep the result.

(Let this sit a bit long.) Well, I accept I am irresponsible for the filing system I have created! That's the problem (and potentially the solution). Searching for a domain using Find is a very useful tool, but I rarely use that, because searching all folders is slow, and this is something that has to be done for every message being filed pretty much (the filing process I'm using as an example is of going through each too-hard-basket file and ensuring it goes somewhere). Going through the list of old searches is the same problem as going through all the folders trying to remember where the message may have been stored.

For example, taking a random mail I want to file, I start by carefully selecting the domain say "@dlep14.itg", copy that, give the new mail folder focus again, and paste into the find dialog. Click the various options, and Search. Wait around a minute. That's great because it shows the folder that the message is most likely to go in, and messages that might be misfiled. So I click on my message in the new mail folder, hit M, page up to the top of the folders list (because it's highlighted on the find folder), start typing the name of the target folder until it appears, and hit enter. Job done. Repeat 6053 times for the remaining messages. It's that last part that's the problem when one is irresponsible enough to have 6054 messages in the new mail folder (remember these are messages which have already escaped my filtering).

I guess what I was suggesting is some way of accelerating and partly automating that process, or something similar. Eg pmail loads all the .PMI files into memory (15 megs on my database). When an email is open or highlighted, I press a "file me!" button, and it uses heuristics to look at the domain, instantly showing the most likely folder for it to go into. It could give other options to search on, or allow something in the headers to be selected and searched for, or do a brute force search as you type. Hit enter and it's filed. The best part would then be if it could teach an auto-filing filter, which in my case is already set up. There's nothing awfully elaborate about that, it's just automating the manual process, but there are probably better ways.

Aha! You're in luck because you can use Folder Autofiltering to do this. When you turn on Autofiltering for a folder you can tell the folder to always accept mail from and sent to xxxx.com. When mail from xxx.com arrives it goes straight into the folder. When you send a message to xxx.com or reply to a message from xxx.com a copy of the reply goes straight into the folder.

You will need to begin somewhere - mark your messages as unread, set up Autofiltering on your existing folders and then close and open your new mail folder.

Check out the help file: Reading and filing mail > Working with folders > Autofiltering folders

Once this is setup you won't need to worry about any future filing (unless it's for a new domain name).

Wo, just tried that, and unfortunately it did kind of the opposite of what I needed. It automatically takes all messages from the new mail folder with that domain in them (well in this case From "Texas Instruments") and files them in an "unknown" (to me) folder that is one of hundreds. In other words, it (ideally) automatically hides all incoming mail never to be seen or replied to (except by accident), since not remembering where they all go is part of the original problem.

It would work great if all autofilter folders were open, eg a few on screen for newsletters to read, family emails to reply to etc. One of the problems is newsletter clutter.

 I'm just going to have to go through and file them carefully, then I think I'll make a series of "main" folders for everything that didn't get filed, and keep them to 10k messages or so each.