Trouble Shooting

Listed below are some common problems that you may encounter, and some ways to fix them.

An Empty Message Keeps Appearing in the Queue Manager Window

1. Go to Help > About > Info and note the location of your home mailbox directory.
2. Close Pegasus Mail.
3. Using Windows Explorer, go to your home mailbox directory.
4. Delete any 0-byte files having the extensions PNX, PMX, PMO, or PMW.
5. Start Pegasus Mail.

Blank Attachment View

1. Use Help | About Pegasus Mail | Info and note the HOME mail directory. Exit Pegasus Mail.
2. Go to the HOME mail directory and edit the state.pmj file.
3. Locate the [Reader] section of the file and delete the Attmt line. You can edit it the values to something like these:

  [READER]
  Digests=155,206,731,309,"216,268,128,0"
  Body=0,0,798,486,"156 100 0"
  Attmt=0,0,0,0,"138 0"
  Ann=0,0,0,0,"0"

You may also be able to slide the mouse pointer toward the top of the "blank attachment page" and when it becomes cruciform, depress the left mouse button and drag the invisible separator downwards.

Using authenticated SMTP

David Harris has implemented ESMTP AUTH CRAM-MD5 for Pegasus Mail , Mercury and Mercury32. They do SMTP authentication in accordance with RFCs 2554 and 2195. Mercury and Mercury/32 also do the LOGIN and the strange MS AUTH=LOGIN.

Try File | Network configuration | (Sending) SMTP, edit the SMTP configuration, select the "Security" tab and then select the authentication option as specified by your ISP. Most ISPs require the the second or third SMTP authentication option.

Restoring a mailbox from a CD-ROM Backup

Creator: David J. Kocmoud

Note: This FAQ assumes you are installing/using the latest versions of Pegasus Mail and Mercury, if applicable. Check your versions against those listed on the official Pegasus Mail web site.

Q: I backed up my Pegasus Mail mailbox directory to CD-R (or CD-RW or DVD or whatever) and restored it after a hard drive replacement (or Windows OS reinstall). Now everything is behaving very strange. I cannot delete new mail messages and my mail folders say they are corrupted. Also, I can't make changes nor add addresses to any of my address books. Additionally, changes to my Pegasus Mail configuration settings don't get saved anymore. What's going on?

A: When you restore files from CD-ROM-based technology, the OS usually sets read-only flag on each of the files. Thus, Pegasus Mail cannot make changes to the files anymore. To fix this, select all the files in your mailbox directory and press Alt-Enter (or right- click on the files and choose Properties from the popup context menu). Uncheck the Read-Only checkbox and click OK.

Creating TCP-IP Session Logs

Go to File | Network configuration | General and turn on "Create Internet session logs (advanced diagnostic use only)"

Checking this control tells Pegasus Mail to create special log files that show the entire exchange of information between it and the servers it connects to. Each session will be created in a file called TCPxxxx.WPM in your home mailbox directory (the "xxxx" is replaced by four digits). Creating session logs will slow down the performance of your system somewhat, and you should be aware that any username and password information exchanged between Pegasus Mail and the server will be shown in the log, even if you use SSL to secure the connection. Session logs are primarily useful if you need to debug a problem between Pegasus Mail and one of the servers it connects to - you should enable the option only on instructions from a system administrator or from Pegasus Mail technical support. Technical note: this control has the same effect as using a "-Z 32" commandline switch when you run Pegasus Mail.

You can now try again to send/receive the mail and then look at the resulting TCP/IP debug file. Review of this file will tell you exactly what is going on between Pegasus Mail and the server. Turn this control off when you are done troubleshooting.

Folders and or Filing Trays are Missing from the Folders Window

Try the following procedure. This has worked for several others to restore the functionality of the message folders:

1. Use Help | About Pegasus Mail | Info to determine your mail directory. Exit Pegasus mail.
2. Rename the file HIERARCH.PM in your HOME mail directory to HIERARCH.SAV.
3. Run Pegasus Mail. Your HIERARCH.PM will be re-created and should start working correctly.

Be advised that this will delete any tray structure you may have created and it will have to be recreated manually.

Messages Appear to Send, but them Time Out and Fail

For some reason, this problem has become very common in the past few months.

A POP3/SMTP transmissions may fail if the MTU packet size is so large that a packet is fragmented. These oversize packets are not accepted and so are resent. This results in a timeout, generally at the end of the message transmission. You need to reduce the MTU size. Windows defaults to a 1500 MTU and many routers and DSL connections need 1492.

Download the Dr. TCP utility that will automatically modify the MTU setting. The Dr. TCP utility only needs to be run once. The registry change is saved at the completion of the following procedure.

1. Download the Dr. TCP utility: http://www.dslreports.com/drtcp
2. Run the utility.
3. From the menu choose your Ethernet adapter.
4. In the MTU field, type 1492.
5. Click in another field, but do not type anything.
6. Click Apply to save the change, and then click Exit.
7. Reboot the PC.
8. Test

I this still fails reduce the MTU size to 1400 and try again after rebooting.

You also might want to get a copy of SG TCP Optimizer that I find quite handy. This little utility will allow you to test your MTU for maximum size without fragmentation. http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

How to Decode TNEF-style Attached Files

This is a procedure for setting up a viewer for the TNEF type attachments written by Jan Muszynski <jancm@BIGFOOT.COM>.

These are probably ?!*%$# tnef type files generated by MS apps and they may contain real attachments, (the winmail.dat is usually useless however). You can retrieve the information in these (assuming they are tnef files - check the content type headers of the message- There should be a header just before the enclosure) using the view button as follows:

1. Get a copy of fentun. http://www.fentun.com/
2. Place it in a directory. (I'll assume that it's in C:\Fentun, making the program path C:\Fentun\fentun.exe)

3. Edit the file 'mime-map.pm' using any text editor, such as notepad. This file is located in the same directory as the Pegasus Mail executable. (Normally C:\Pmail for a standalone installation IIRC - my installation is non-standard so I can't double check). This file normally only has 1 entry in it as follows

   Text/HTML = HTML-text

   Add a line following the above line

   application/ms-tnef = TNEF

   What this does is cause Pegasus to check the content type headers of incoming messages/enclosures. If it finds one with a content type of application/ms-tnef it will generate an internal Pegasus 'attachment type information' label of TNEF. You can use any label you want here - I chose TNEF because it seems logical.

   You can use this mechanism with any other content types that Pegasus doesn't have built in support for.

4. In Pegasus go to Tools|Options:Viewers Click on the ADD button. In the dialogue that comes up select the radio button next to

   '"Attachment-type" information'. In the dropdown box for 'matches' type in TNEF. It will NOT appear in the dropdown choices since you have manually created it.

5. For 'Command to execute' select the 'Run this program' radio-button and point it to fentun.exe (ie. C:\Fentun\fentun.exe)
6. For extension to use for temporary file I use .tnf (don't forget the leading .)

That's it. You'll now be able to view the contents of any tnef attachments (or winmail.dat - which will come up empty 99.9, if not 100, percent of the time) that you get simply by hitting the 'view' button (which will no longer be greyed out).

NOTE: Instead of steps 4,5, and 6 you can edit the viewer.pm file located in your home directory (viewers are defined per user, not globally) and add the following line to it (note - change the path as required)

2;TNEF;.tnf;C:\Fentun\FENTUN.EXE

Pegasus Mail Keeps Telling You to Reindex a Folder, Even After you Reindex It

1. Move all the messages you want to save to a temp folder and delete all the messages in the original folder.
2. Use the right click "recover deleted space" to remove all messages form the folder.
3. If step 2 works then simply move all of the messages from the temp folder back to the original folder and delete the temp folder.
4. If step 2 fails then delete the original folder and rename the temp folder to match the original name. Reset the filter pointing to this folder.

Pegasus Mail Displays the Splash Screen and then Just 'Hangs'

Two things can cause this,

1. A bad message in the new mail directory, you are using the preview mode and it's the first message in the viewer. This one is solved by moving the *.CNM files out of the new mail directory, opening the program and putting them back one at a time until you find the bad one.
2. A corrupted hierarch.pm file. You solve this by deleting or renaming this file and running the program again. If you have an extensive tray structure I would recommend you use the rename so that you can try editing the file later to remove the corruption.

How to Move Your Mailbox Directory to a New Location

The Tools | Options | Mailbox location function of V4.01 is broken. In order to move the mailbox location you must either use v3.12c or:

1. Use Help | About Pegasus Mail | Info and note the current HOME mail directory. It's generally the same as the NEW mail directory.
2. Exit Pegasus Mail.

3. Edit pmail.ini file in the NEW mail directory and change the following line to point at the new HOME mail directory. These are using the UNC format to point at server ESVCS, volume SYS, directory MAIL, subdirectory BB000001

   Home mailbox location = \\ESVCS\SYS\MAIL\BB000001
   Working home mailbox location = \\ESVCS\SYS\MAIL\BB000001

4. Move all of the files from the HOME mail directory to the new HOME mail directory but DO NOT move pmail.ini.

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Page Name	Last Modified
PegasusMail	May 19, 2006 4:48 pm