This morning I noticed that my primary folder (where I organize most of my correspondence, NOT the New Mail folder) was in the folder's list 3 times. Furthermore, when I tried to get folder information it had something that looked like this: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! under Unique ID (only they weren't really exclamation points but some ascii symbol that was similar). I tried reindexing and it said there were no problems, then I (stupidly) picked the bottom one off the list and deleted it. Wham! all three copies were gone and I had to go to my backup. Interestingly (and unfortunately) my live backup software somehow decided that since Pegasus had deleted the file, it should also so I had to go back further to find a good version of the .PMM file and its corresponding index.
Then proceeded much adventure with the HIERARCH.PM file and attempting to hexedit and repair the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! stuff that had somehow found its way who knows when into the .PMM file, ie, this problem has probably been lurking in the database for awhile now and Pegasus only today decided to cough up a furball about it. Following some interesting advice I found here in the forums (mostly quite old) I renamed HIERARCH.PM to .sav and restarted Pmail, which caused all my elegant folders and trays to be strewn all over. Played with that mess and trying to restore the older .PM file for several hours and at this moment, I have an edited header on a 370MB database file of a year's emails that I'd dearly love to keep intact, one extra long line in the Pegasus-generated HIERARCH.PM file that corresponds to my somewhat inept and blind hacking job on the header (but the !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'s are thankfully gone), and two copies (instead of 3) of the same folder with the same name and the same number of messages in each.
I'd like to figure out a way to fix that if I can, but am already in so far over my head I'm getting a bit nauseous. Therefore I thought I'd ask the geniuses on this forum for your assistance.
P.S. I've been using several versions of Pegasus Mail since the 90's, have donated for it a few times, introduced Novell to David indirectly (at the 1993 Brainshare meeting in Salt Lake) and have rarely had a thing go wrong with this wonderful software that wasn't my fault or that I couldn't resolve. Today however is different. BTW I'm running 4.63 at the moment, (running on Windows 7 Home Premium) am nervous about upgrading to the 4.7 until I figure this problem out. Thanking you I remain... :)
BTW, this is the real thing it does, not sure if the browser will let me paste it here: ÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌÌ
UPDATE: I've been manually recreating the folder trays that were lost with the HIERARCH.PM file's demise. While doing that I was able to partially recreate the multiple folders issue, for every folder I moved to a filing tray, yet another copy of the original folder I want only one of showed up in the Mailbox. I've replicated this several times now and have had as many as a dozen versions of the same folder hanging there. They are all "live" including being able to read messages in them, any and all "mirror" the original (wherever that is). If I sort one by date, they are all sorted by date, etc. Closing and reopening Pegasus makes all but two of them disappear. Weird huh?