Just a few more things for the record.

Opening the folder for the second time took 7 hours, same as the first time.  

Splitting it into smaller parts was fast--roughly a half hour to do all the parts.

Also, in my first post I said that peak memory usage opening the folder

went to about 1GB but now I realize that wasn't so. This time which was

right after a reboot it went to just 324MB.  (The first time, peak

memory was already at 1GB because of some prior process.)  

Many thanks for all of the help.

Hi,

A message folder (.PMM file) hangs shortly after I

left-click on it in Pegasus' left pane.  It starts to open, loads

all the messages, then hangs on "Sorting...."

The folder is 423MB and contains 64,812 messages--just under the

65,000-message limit that I've heard can be a problem. (not sure if

this is true, but I read it somewhere)

Rightmousing, I get the following:

The folder indexes OK and compresses OK.  

"Check consistency" indicates nothing wrong.

The size reported by Pegasus matches the size seen in Windows Explorer.

I'm running Pegasus Mail 4.41 on Windows 2000 SP4, 256MB of RAM.

Pegasus is standalone (not networked), and has never been used by more

than one user (me).  Total size of mailbox is 5.24GB.  There

is 6GB free space on Pegasus' drive (E:).  

When Pegasus is trying to open this .PMM file, processor usage goes to

100% and swapfile usage goes to 1GB of a 1.2GB swapfile.  I guess

this just means Pegasus is trying as hard as it can, not that the

swapfile is too small or something!

Some other info:  the folder is updated daily, by messages being

filtered into it by content control rules. It contains listserve text

messages only and no attachments (so no viruses).  Anyway I doubt

this is an antivirus problem--right now I have no antivirus program.

(Bad! - but I got rid of NAV months ago, haven't replaced it yet.)

Everything else in Pegasus Mail is functional as far as I can tell.

So, is there a way to recover this folder?  Opening the .PMM file

in an editor, I see that its structure is simple - plain text. 

Its .PMI (index) file is another story--full of non-text

characters.  Is there some kind of routine I can write to recover

the good parts (on a copy of course)??  Just grasping at

straws....

Backups exist, but they are 4 months old. I would lose 20% of the messages.  :(

Thanks for any insight on what to do!

Jan...happy Pegasus Mail user since 1996

Just leave it alone and it will open in time; it's going to take a long tine to open these messages and sort them.  You have got to reduce the number of messages in this folder after you get it open. 

Thank you. I'd like to think that's true, but I have a comparable folder that

is 318MB with 54,356 messages, which opens, sorted, in 8 seconds.

This

folder seems to be truly hung up. If I leave it for half an hour it's

*still* hung up. I suppose I could wait still longer, like overnight--do you suppose that would do it?

Jan 

ps-Yes these folders are on my list of things to organize.

[quote user="jan78"]

Thank you. I'd like to think that's true, but I have a comparable folder that

is 318MB with 54,356 messages, which opens, sorted, in 8 seconds.

This

folder seems to be truly hung up. If I leave it for half an hour it's

*still* hung up. I suppose I could wait still longer, like overnight--do you suppose that would do it?

Jan 

ps-Yes these folders are on my list of things to organize.

[/quote]

Yep, it can take hours if there is a lot of new messages in the folder.   

Hello! [quote user="jan78"]

Thank you. I'd like to think that's true, but I have a comparable folder that is 318MB with 54,356 messages, which opens, sorted, in 8 seconds.

This folder seems to be truly hung up. If I leave it for half an hour it's *still* hung up. I suppose I could wait still longer, like overnight--do you suppose that would do it?

Jan

ps-Yes these folders are on my list of things to organize.
[/quote] I think Thomas S. is right when saying that you simply have to wait. Unfortunately, I guess you have to wait a looong tiem before the folder really opens. As far as I can tell, there are two issues here:
(a) I have experienced a longer duration of the "Sorting..."-process if the folder to open is set to use some of the Grouped views. I think that grouping by thread activity can take a long time (several seconds), especially when combined with Sort in reverse order. So, the time it takes you to have your slow folder sorted may depend on the sorting- and grouping-settings you have chosen for that folder.
(b) I have also expereinced some folder taking much time for sorting. The strange thing is that I have some fast folders that can be opened and sorted fast, i.e. two seconds or so, and some slow folders that take much, much longer to sort. An example: one of my folders has approximately 4,400 messages, is set to group by thread activity and reverse order, and takes about 20-25 seconds to open; another folder with some thousand messages as well opens in just a few seconds (2 seconds perhaps). I have no clue why opening the one folder takes much more time than opening the other.

If you can, try opening your slow folder overnight. If the folder is open, move some of the messages to another, newly created folder; however, moving them will probably take a lot of time as well.

Thomas S: Yep, it can take hours if there is a lot of new messages in the folder.  

 --

Wow!  So, all the new messages could create that much of a "backlog"....makes sense.

I'll try it tonight and post the outcome.  

I just hope I haven't damaged the file by terminating the process early when it appeared to be frozen.  We shall see.

Jan

Hi Thomas N, I'm glad you brought that up, about the sorting.

As it turns out, the messages are set to sort as Grouping=None. 

It was good to be able to verify this!  For if grouped, I'm sure

you are right, it would make a long time even longer.

At first I

thought I'd be unable to check the sort order BEFORE opening, but it

turns out I can. The right-click selects the folder without opening it,

in other words it does more than just provide a context menu. Never

noticed that before, but it's nice.

No, it's not good to stick everything in one folder. (blush!) 

This one-folder-for-certain-listservs was never meant to be

permanent!  I promised myself to create more granular filter sets

"pretty soon".... but never did, and got along ok without them, sort

of.  Now instead of it feeling like a chore, I will do it in

gratitude if I can just get this to open!  If it takes a long time

to separate them out that's OK!

Worst case if you can't resolve this, you might try exporting the mail to another format and then importing it back in.  Google [export "Pegasus Mail" convert] and you might find some tools that could to the trick.  EConv from andtechnologies.com might work (free command-line tools to convert from Pegasus Mail mailboxes to Eudora and back). Since Eudora mailbox folders are just .mbx files you might be able to export the folder to a Eudora folder, then open it directly in Pegasus Mail (without re-importing it) and split it up by date (or by some other meaningful division).

OK, the folder is in good shape!

It opened after about 7 hours.  Then the unexpected happened. I clicked on the "Date" column header to sort by date,

and... another long sorting operation was underway.* Oops. Finally I aborted it in order to get some work done.

Tonight I'll open the folder again and THIS time I will do NO sorting once it's open, just get to work and prune it down.

The .PMI file has today's date/time on it and is 236K smaller than

it was yesterday, so clearly some indexing happened. Tonight I expect

to see the folder opening faster than before, but I don't know. We

shall see!

 --

* I was kind of surprised at the

slowness of the date sorting, after all that indexing, but am thinking

maybe it has to do with approaching the 65,000 message limit. Just

guessing.