Hello All,
I would have asked this a bit earlier, but the system wasn't letting me create an account. Some problem with the Captcha system.
Anyway, I'm here in New Zealand, on the other island from where David lives...
Some of you have probably heard that one of our major local ISPs has rather suddenly decided to terminate all its e-mail services. Unhappily, that affects me, as my wife and I both had large collections of e-mail stored there - around 3GB each!
Of course, the support they offered for downloading this e-mail was fairly ineffective. I'm not a fan of Outlook, and don't know if it could be relied on to do this. Thunderbird was suggested, but having no great experience with it, wasn't too keen.
Having been a long time user of Pegasus, I had great faith in its reliability and believe it is solidly coded, so I opted for that as my main platform for this mission. However, using IMAP off-line was not something I had tried...
Of course, that's a bit misleading, because once you're off-line, you're not really using it (IMAP), and instead are simply asking Pegasus to open its cached folders for you. If only it were "simply"!
I read the Help file instructions and it all looked good, so I went ahead. (I started this project at least two weeks before the deadline, but even that was not enough...) Downloading this much e-mail was very slow, and took days.
I found out how to get WPM to download (copy / cache) all messages to the client side. It's not as easy as I'd hoped, as you have to do it folder by folder, but at least you can do a Verify to check how many messages are in each Folder, and that the data is consistent, so that was a plus.
However, I have since discovered that in Pegasus (for Windows at least), IMAP Off-Line is not quite what I'd imagined. I ended up here, and found several threads on exactly this question, none of which seem to have been resolved.
I have done my own experimenting, and it seems it works like this:
After downloading (caching) all messages, shutdown and restart Pegasus.
If required, choose (type-in) the account name to open the desired account. Local folders only, are displayed.
Go to 'Tools > IMAP profiles...' and select the relevant profile. Now click the 'Connect' button.
If the IMAP server is still there, everything will connect as usual, and all the "remote" (cached) mail folders will be visible.
Now, to use "Off-Line," Right-Click on the account mailbox icon, and select 'Disconnect this mailbox'.
Ok, now click the "On/Off-Line" toggle icon near the bottom RH corner of the PM window. You'll get a Red X appear over the Network Tee symbol. Pegasus is now Offline.
Now, if you go back to 'Tools > IMAP profiles...' and click the 'Use offline' button, you should be able to see all your cached Folder and messages. (This is from memory, unfortunately...)
Voila, you are now Offline, and able to access all your old mail, off-line.
The problem is, it seems to me, you cannot get to this Off-Line state, without being able to actually go On-Line first.
As soon as you shut Pegasus down, you are back to square one. Now that the server is offline, I have not been able to go back Off-Line and open my cached mail...
When I try this without the mail server, all I get is the account mailbox icon appearing where it normally does, but no folders below it... I'm hoping I'm doing this wrong!
Apparently, Pegasus wants to check with Daddy before it will open the door. But Daddy's gone.
Obviously, I should have made sure I copied all my Cached messages to equivalent local folders while the server was still live... Silly me!
Does anyone know how to do that, now?
Or, is there some other way to get Pegasus to open the cached files so I don't need to do that?
I'm running Windows 7 64-bit, with Pegasus V4.72.572 (latest download).
Hoping someone out there knows this trick! Is there a secret setting / config file switch somewhere that says "Daddy says it's ok"?
Obviously, there's a flag somewhere inside the code which gets set by a successful connection and folder check, to allow this Offline access to happen later, but how can we set it manually?