Ghost email

[Global]

Could I please have some help with an email problem? When I open email messages on my 7book I often find the text of old messages that I thought I deleted, followed by the text proper to the new message. These older texts are from before the upgrade of my s7 to 7 book.

Since I don't store messages for long on the 7book, one solution to my problem would be to do a onetime complete erasure of alll messages. How do I do this, since these "ghost" messages don't appear in any email directory? No doubt there is a file somewhere I can delete which email will automatically recreate the next time it is used. Thanks.
Global

[cshandley]

You could try rebuilding the index file.

To do this you:
0. Do a backup if you haven't done one recently!

1. Close Email. Close any other memory hungry programs.

2. Rename the "Index" file in "C:\System\Mail\" to "IndexOLD" (or similar).

3. Create a new file called "Index" in place of the old one; try using Word, and if that doesn work (see step 4) then try any other application. Ideally you would create a file that is empty - this can be done using Editor.

4. Run Email & wait for it to rebuild the index. This should not take more than a few minutes (if emails are stored on the C drive). If it takes a long time, simply kill Email (if you don't know how to do this ask someone...), and try using a different program to create a dummy Index file (step 3).

5. If all attempts at rebuilding fail (perhaps due to lack of memory), then simply delete the dummy Index & rename IndexOLD back to Index.

---
Chris Handley

[MikeMcC]

No doubt there is a file somewhere I can delete which email will automatically recreate the next time it is used. Yes, the "Mail" folder. If you want to start again with a totally 'virgin' Email application, delete the Mail folder and it will be created again when you launch the application. You will, in addition to losing your messages, lose all the mail settings - Usernames, Passwords, email addresses, POP3 servers and SMTP servers.

[Global]

Thanks to you both. I'll get to work fixing it now.
Global

[Lewis]

...someone else with Mail problems!... but sounds like yours can be easily solved if you're not worried about losing existing stored messages. Can't think why the upgrade from 7 to 7Book would have caused the trouble, of itself; perhaps, just a glitch while restoring your machine backup after the hardware upgrade and cold restart.

I'm pretty sure the problem lies with some corruption in the crucial system/Mail/Index file. Chris's suggestion of forcing Mail to rebuild it's Index from scratch should work, especially if you only have a small number of messages stored. You may find that your free memory drops alarmingly during re-Indexing (if you have hundreds of stored messages), but this should recover once completed. As Chris says, just close down any other running programs first to increase free space. If you still find you run out of memory mid-way, and have a lot of files stored on the C drive, you could move these temporarily to Compact Flash or your PC. If this still doesn't provide enough space (unlikely) - perhaps because you have many apps installed onto C (and don't want to uninstall & reinstall them) - you can move your existing Mail folder to CF from within Mail, using Tools>Move Message Store (you'll need to open Mail, using your old Index, to do this). After re-Indexing (which will be appreciably slower on CF) you can move the Message Store back to C.

Note that a Word file named Index won't work - Mail will just sit there flashing 'opening' ad infinitum! An Agenda (or, probably, any Data type) file should work as a 'seed' for re-Indexing. If you're not confident with a HexEditor, either just use a copy of your existing Agenda file, renamed to Index, or create an 'empty' one by temporarily renaming your Agenda file and then launching the Agenda app.

You should find that when (if) Mail reopens, after re-Indexing, all your existing messages are intact, without any stray characters. However, this re-Indexing is an undocumented, 'hidden' facility which another Psion Place contributor discovered by chance! I'm still trying to assess it's limitations and robustness in recovering a much bigger Mail folder (http://www.pdastreet.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=15961 if you're really interested, but I wouldn't recommend it for light reading! ;)).

So, if you're not worried about losing your old messages, or Mail still displays 'ghost' deleted messages (are these strings of characters appearing just in the e-mail subject lines of the Inbox/Outbox/Sent, etc, header views, or stray text appearing actually within opened messages or entire, discrete ghost messages?) you may prefer to start afresh with a 'clean' Mail folder as Mike suggests.

Lewis

[Global]

Lewis, when I opened a new message I would find the complete text of a ghost message (never the same one) with header, followed by the complete text of the new message.

I have opted to go for the clean mail file as suggested by Mike. I don't store messages for long on the machine, so all I lost were the POP, SMTP settings, etc. And I must admit I was a little nervous about properly doing the replacement of the index file.

Global

[Lewis]

...how bizarre!

I was expecting you to probably say it was just the inbox/outbox/draft/sent folder views that were showing spurious entries, not individual, opened messages.

Was already thinking that a fresh start would most likely be the best course, in your circumstances, but now I'm certain!

L