Hello:

I use Pegasus Mail Version 4.73.639, Mar 30 2018, build ID 639, running with Wine-4.0 under Linux Devuan 5.10. The box runs automated backups with the BackInTime application.

Everything is as it should be. ie: in all the years I have been using it, PMail has never skipped a beat. Ever.

But I now have a problem:

I need to find an email (from a bank, from all possible places) which I deleted a couple of months ago thinking the issue that prompted it had been definitely solved.

Nothing but wishful thinking, obviously bad judgement on my behalf.

But I digress.

I keep deleted emails for around 45/60 days and then clear out the folder but now, quite unexpectedly, I need data I no longer have.

The thing is that I have it but it is in my PMail backup files.

I can manage with the just raw text as what I need are just the numbers assigned to the complaints I sent the bank, which they (of course) claim they don't have.

I'd appreciate some guidance to get the text from the backups.
The emails should be in the New Mail or Deleted Messages folders.

Thanks in advance.

Best,

S.

If your mailbox is a subdirectory of \PMail (eg: \pmail\mail\admin), are you backing up the entire \pmail directory?

If so, you could restore it and run it in offline mode. I don't speak Linux/Wine but in Windows I would rename the existing \Pmail directory, restore the one from backup, and then run it, adding the -O (offline) option to the command line.

If you are just backing up the mailbox directory you should be able to add that directory in the backup as an added mailbox to the Pegasus Mail folder list. To do this, open the folder list. With its window active, go to the Folders pulldown menu and select "Add mailbox to list". Select the "Directory path" option, enter the path to that directory, give it a name.

Again, I don't do Linux/Wine but we have forum members that do so post back if you need help with either of these options.

Hello Brian:

Thanks for the prompt reply.

But I am not comfortable with mucking around with my Wine setup, I have not had to touch it since I installed it and would rather not unless absolutely necessary.

I have at least one complete backup (snapshot) taken by the BackInTime application which hopefully should (?) have what I need. ie: the emails from the bank in raw text mode, headers and all either in the New Mail or Deleted Messages folder.

This is independent of Wine as I have the whole /PMAIL/MAIL/ADMIN folder backed up.

I just need to ID the right folder/s, open it with the proper editor (eg: mceditor) and search for the headers containing the bank's name.

Thanks for your input.

Best,

S.

In your original post you say "I need to find an email (from a bank, from all possible places)". To me that means all new mail files and every Pegasus Mail folder file (.PMM file).

The folder filename can be found in folder information but the email you are looking for could be in a deleted messages folder that has been deleted in your current Pegasus Mail so there is no way to identify what its folder filename was when the backup was made. I suspect that you are going to have to do a text search for the banks name in every .CNM and .PMM file in the backup \ADMIN directory. Hopefully someone will come along shortly with a suggestion on the best way to do that.

Two other thoughts...

Are old emails stored on your email hosts server?

If you have access to a windows machine you might be able to copy the backup to a USB device and run it on that machine like a portable installation.

In directory with the backup PMM folders (files with emails)

The following linux commands might give you data you need.

for a in *.PMM; do echo $a; grep -a "Apple" <$a; done

First part is to process all the mail folders.
2nd part displays name of each,
3rd part searches the text in quotes.
Note -a is to treat file as ascii since grep sees PMM files as binary.

That would hopefully, identify which folder has the text.

Hello:

Thanks, that worked and I have the folder but the content is not plain text so the data is not visible.

That works: I copied the whole shebang to a USB stick and started PMail on an XPSP3 VM I have sitting around to run an old copy of Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional.

But PMail is asking me for a user name which I don't have.
It is a standalone setup just for me, the Admin.

Admin does not work and my Linux system's UserID does not work either.
I recall having had a problem with the user name years ago but for the life of me I cannot remember the solution.

So ...

Almost there but no cigar ...

Thanks for your input.

Best,

S.

I wrote a program to extract messages from a folder file to make individual CNM files that should be regular text files.
File is extractmsg.cpp
Would just run it with the name of the folder file.
Probable be best to make a directory and copy folder file to it.
mkdir tempxxx
cd tempxxx
cp /locations_of_folder/folder.PMM .
extractmsg folder.PMM

Source code, compiled Linux version, compiled windows
1214 Aug 29 07:10 extractmsg.cpp
15168 Aug 29 07:11 extractmsg
41984 Aug 29 07:11 extractmsg.exe

Then one could do a search of the CNM files to find which ones have the info.

Can send the files if you don't have setup to compile cpp program.
mikes@guam.net

#include <cstdio>
#include <cstring>
#include <cstdlib>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    FILE *fp1,*fp2;
int j=0;
char ch,fileout[20]="MSG0000.CNM",folderin[20]="";
if (argc < 2)
    {
        printf("Need to provide base filename\n");
        exit(255);
    }
    strcpy(folderin,argv[1]);

if((fp1=fopen(folderin,"rb+")))
    {
for(int i=0;i<128;i++)
            fgetc(fp1); // Skip 128 character header of folder
    }
else exit(8); // if file not found leave program
while(1)
    {
        sprintf(fileout,"MSG%4.4d.CNM",j++);
        fp2=fopen(fileout,"wb+");
while(1)
        {
            ch=fgetc(fp1);
if(feof(fp1)) break;
if(ch!='\x1a') // messages end with esc '\x1a'
            { 
                fputc(ch,fp2);
            }
else
            {
                fclose(fp2); // close message and open new one.
                sprintf(fileout,"MSG%4.4d.CNM",j++);
                fp2=fopen(fileout,"wb+");
            }
        }
if(feof(fp1)) break; // end of PMM file done.
    }
    fclose(fp1);
    fclose(fp2);
    remove(fileout); // Last fileout would be empty file.
return 0;
}

This is because the drive letter is not C:. Adding the -roam option to the command line will overcome this. Your run command should look like

<drive>:\PMAIL\Programs\winpm-32.exe -a -roam.

Another simpler option to change the PMM file into one that can be opened with a text editor.

Text Editors think the file is binary since it contains null characters.
Did a test on a small folder to test.

PMM files have a 128 byte header at beginning that contains folder info.
In case of this SETI.PMM it is Seti52C4FE03:669FETI with nulls removed.
The messages are separated by \x1a or \32 octal that tr likes?
So this command removes the nulls from file, and replaces the \32 with '\n'.
I generally use geany or gedit but any text editor should open the file after cleaning

tr -d '\0' <SETI.PMM |tr '\32' '\n' >SETIX.PMM; geany SETIX.PMM

An option to skip the 128 character header using dd..

dd if=SETI.PMM bs=128 skip=1 | tr '\32' '\n' >SETIXX.PMM ; geany SETIXX.PMM

dd copies the folder file with block size of 128 bytes, and just skips the first 128 bytes. Then clean the record end markers.

Problem might be the message text being either quoted-printable or BASE64 encoded in which both cases searching for text might not find what he's looking for if only searching folder or message files as text, Mike. IOW: Approaching this issue via adding as a temporary mailbox as suggested by Brian might be by far the easiest solution if you don't want to write a full blown MIME message parser. With some luck it might otherwise be possible to find a short enough word (like "bank", e.g.) in quoted-printable encoded messages, though, because this encoding usually leaves major text parts unencoded which neither contain non-ASCII characters nor line breaks.

Think in earlier search to find which folder it was in the text was found. So should find the message. Message body might be base64 encoded, but that would be easy to decode.

Sure finding the folder helps, but scanning (at most) two Gigs of encoded text won't be funny nevertheless and you need to keep this in mind if the search fails: You might get false negatives in such cases ...

PS: And there's another catch: If searching for attachment names these might be encoded as well and in these cases even language encodings like UTF-8 might come into play ...

Hello:

That did it. 8^)
First tried the -roam option with a drive (not C:\), which did not work.

So I just copied the whole PMail folder to C:\ in the XPSP3 VM, Pmail started without any issues and I found the one deleted email with the reply I was looking for.

But it makes me wonder how, with all the plug-ins and utilities PMail has, is it that there isn't one to just mount a complete backed up PMail folder to rescue just the needed bits and pieces from a PMail folder.

Problem finally solved and all's well that ends well.

My sincere thanks to all the forum members who answered, opined and/or proposed a solution, a wonderful community.

Have a great week-end.

Best,

S.

You could just copy a PMM/PMI pair to an existing mailbox directory but would run into a duplicate name issue. And since it's pretty easy to just install a second temporary "throw away instance" of Pegasus Mail some place else and use it for creating a new folder with a different name and the missing message(s) this would solve your issue pretty easily without an additional tool.

A couple things.
With Linux, you could just create another user on the linux and login with that user and setup wine for that user. The wine installs under each users home directory, so it is totally separate. So woule make no difference to your existing setup. I have a wine Pegasus setup under root user for testing with my real wine Pegasus under my user id. But any other id would work.

Second, Under folder you could probable use the add mailbox to add the folder in another directory, but as has been mentioned. Since it is a copy of an existing folder in your real mail box, would probable cause an issue. Would probable recommend renaming the PMM/PMI set to a different name, and probable need to use a hexeditor to modify the uniq name in the beginning of file.
Example:

Seti (number of nulls) 52C4FE03:669F:SETI

Has long folder name then uniq id that Pegasus uses. Have heard that if these are duplicated it causes issues.

Seems you are using a very old version of wine??
I am running Fedora 38 Linux and use the wine from the winehq site.
I run the developement version versus the standard version that is a little new.
Linux setzconote.dyndns.org 6.4.14-200.fc38.x86_64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sat Sep 2 16:36:06 UTC 2023 x86_64 GNU/Linux

winehq-devel-8.15-1.1.x86_64

Believe you mentioned you had Pegasus setup as single user, so adding a different user under Pegasus would require some work. In my root setup I have it setup with multi user, so have a default admin user and a pair called jack and jill for testing. So it has 3 users under it.

Only issue I've had with Pegasus is that the IERenderer doesn't work well with wine. So generally just run the uninstaller for the IERenderer after an upgrade. At present also remove the BEARHTML files as well, since the newer TER32/HTS32 handle most emails fine, and a few don't work with the BEARHTML (or perhaps libtidy that it uses). Only minor issue is some emails display shifted a bit to the right. Generally messages that if opened in browser show up as centered?

With latest IERender, it does not crash any longer, but doesn't have messages pop up with unsupported function calls, and display a little off. But I think that is wine not fully supporting IE calls, since generally firefox or other browsers work.

Glad you were able to get the data you needed.

There is. It's the 'Add mailbox to list" function that I mentioned in my first post.

Hello:

Once again, thank you very much to all those who helped out.

Best,

S.