Thank you, Han.  I am going to move this topic to the Pegasus Mail support forum (which is where it should have been in the first place - sorry!).

I'm looking for a solution that doesn't require user interaction.  There's two reasons for this; one: I've trained the users to be suspicious of email that wants to be activated in such a fashion (that training has paid off significantly in the past - we got hundreds of email zip viruses on day zero)  and two: my users, my management, and I myself want this sort of thing to be handled in a completely user-transparent fashion.  These people do not want to mess about tuning their email system, they want to do their real jobs.

Most of Pegasus's configuration is extremely well suited to this sort of thing; flipping switches from N to Y or editing strings is pretty easy to do on a massive scale, and using INI files means that configurations can be stored and backed up using very OS-agnostic methods.  There's no putzing about with registry imports and exports that may or may not be written to disk or held in memory at any given time, there's no relative identifiers encoded into anything. The only exception is the bit-mapped and byte-mapped variables, and even those can generally be decoded by simply  turning stuff on and off and diffing the resultant INI files.

For example:  If I wanted to set the "organization string" for 10,000 users without having to co-ordinate the efforts of 10,000 human beings, I could do it all by myself with four or five lines of code.  Pegasus's simple, clean ASCII configuration is what allows me to do so.  Registry-driven software is inherently more difficult and cost-ineffective to manage.
 

I work for a non-profit organization with around 400 Pegasus Mail users.  Our installation has grown over the last decade to include auto-distribution and setup of individual users' pmail accounts.  We don't run Novell products or Mercury, though we did have Novell once upon a time.  The core mailservers are linux.

Our passwords to our IMAP servers, SMTP servers, SMB/CIFS filesharing, web servers, telephone system, POSIX systems etc. are all single-sourced from a massively redundant LDAP store and co-ordinated/distributed with samba+OpenLDAP.

My users are not familiar with manipulating Pegasus options, and in fact are discouraged from spending time exploring Pegasus configuration.  They don't even know how to enter their passwords, since their normal scheduled password change automagically edits their IMAP.PM for them.  When a deficiency in configuration is reported, I mass-edit all users PMAIL.INI (or whichever) files to correct the problem, and everyone happily goes about their business.

This is very cost efficient.  It makes version upgrades go smoother, too.   Re-writing 400-500 PMAIL.INIs usually only takes a few minutes, and I do it after hours.

But I need to turn on auto-timezone for all my users, and I'm having trouble understanding the byte-map.  When I turn it on, the "Default settings values" in PMAIL.INI changes from 2200001B000100001200000000000000 to 2200001A000100001200000000000000 (8th byte changes from A to B).  When a cow-orker of mine turns his auto-zone on, the same value changes from 00000020000140400000000000000000 to 00000021000140400000000000000000 (8th byte changes from 0 to 1).  We are not only running the same version of Pmail (4.41) we are actually running the same executable - we all do, it's on a network shared drive (again making upgrades smoother).  This is somewhat baffling...

Does anybody know how to set auto-timezone by directly manipulating the PMAIL.INI file?   Using the GUI is needlessly painful for the users and impractical for the organization.

Since version 4.31 there is such an option, although I don't know exactly how it works, as I never ever found time to test it, so you need to do a bit of testing first.

Copied from: http://www.vandenbogaerde.net/pegasusmail/pf_pmfiles.html :

You can now attach a file with the extension "*.PMPPKG" (short for

"Pegasus Mail Preferences PacKaGe") to any message, and Pegasus Mail

will handle it in a special fashion. If the recipient opens or

double-clicks any attachment with that extension, Pegasus Mail will

assume that it is a preferences package and will offer the user the

option of merging the preferences settings it contains with his/her

current preference settings.

The .PMPPKG file is simply a modified version of PMAIL.INI,

containing any of the sections in PMAIL.INI, each section with one or

more preference setting you want to alter (so, you don't have to

include the whole section - you can just change one or two items): you

can use command substitutions in any field; can use "x" placeholders in

any of the integer block fields to preserve the current value at that

position, and can use "-" in the "Default settings values" field to

preserve the value at that position in the string.

.PMPPKG handling is hard-wired into the program, but can be

overridden by adding entries into FILETYPE.PM (either manually or using

the "Viewers" preferences page).