For those of you still wanting to understand my current problem, this is a reworked description of what I just sent to CTM Support:
Hi, I have a serious problem with Powermail 3.1.3 under Mac OS X 10.2.5, on my Powerbook G3 with 128 MB RAM, and 4GB drive (900 MB free). Disc is OK and I can't find any logical or physical errors in the file tree or other errors with either fsck or Drive 10. The PM files and folders owner and permissionsa re set to all access for my (administrative) user and read only for all others. M I G R A T I O N To migrate I'm moving messages from my old client Emailer 2.0v3 into Eudora mailbox format with the Shapiro script "Export - Eudora", that is mentioned in the PowerMail online help. It works well in Classic, which is run under 9.2.2 US, swedish settings, and Applescript 1.8.3. Scrutiny in a text editor shows no irregularities in the resulting files, at least not at a glance. I M P O R T I N G Also, importing these Eudora mailboxes goes very well, except in one case which I'll get back to later, and all messages turn up in the resulting folder (I do them one at a time). In one folder I import 10300 messages in rounds because I want to set the labels to the same label as in my older Email client. When I do this in the imported folder: select all messages, change the label and then move these to the existing folder, I get "Database Error 7, a low level error occurred". The display shows as if only one message have been moved away from the import folder. But if I close and reopen the browser, I can see that all messages have been moved to where I wanted them. Post this the browser do not display properly, that is the visual feedback is not happening, unless I close and reopen after every operation, so I realize I may need a rebuild or something. L O W L E V E L R E B U I L D So I do a low level rebuild (the only way I know of to fix DB problems in PM) and everything seem to work out, including the verification of the DB. All the messages are where I wanted them the first time I rebuild, so I believe that the errors have been overcome. S E R I O U S P R O B L E M The serious problems starts with one of the folders, the Powermail Talk folder, that I've already created as a sub folder. I get new fresh imported Powermail folder on the first level I take the ca 2200 messages there without changing the labels and move them to the already existing folder and I'm then meshing the messages collected with PM with the imported messages. So far so good. All the messages are there, where I want them an no errors reported in the process. M E S S A G E S D I S A P P E A R I then close the app and reopen a day or so later. Then *only* the 30 messages collected previously by PM is there. I do a new rebuild. No messages except those collected by PM. I do notice that the outgoing messages that's supposed to be in there are gone. I send some messages to PowerMail Talk and other places. A filter I have made move all outgoing Powermail Talk to the Powermail Talk folder. Post sending, the messages are gone. After an hour of use only 17 remain of the 30 or so in there (the 2200 imported ones are missing of course). After still some hours *no messages remain* in the PowerMail talk folder. They are all gone!!! After this, this particular folder is behaving like a black hole. Anything moved there seem to go up in smoke. This is not the case with a handful of other folders, including the 10 000+ messages folder. A new rebuild and verification makes no difference. I check my disc. No errors whatsoever. No other apps display problems. I'm a bit stunned and am now back at using Emailer again for my Email. That was not what I had in mind. Q U E S T I O N S I need to know this as soon as possible: € Can you please help me analyze this problem? € What can cause this strange behavior described? € If the method I'm using for migration is not the best, can you please suggest a viable alternative** considering I have 95 000+ messages in 274 folders. I need to move about 30 000 of these at least as I need them under my fingertips. € What can I do to prevent the problems described from reoccurring? € Are there any other way to repair a PM DB beside low level rebuilds? € Why can messages disappear when doing a rebuild? This never happens in Emailer, when I rebuild. On the contrary, messages come back when rebuilding. O U T L O O K ** When I tried 2 years ago to migrate by first importing into Outlook 4.5, messages showed up intact there with all extended ASCII characters correct. I then successfully imported those messages from Outlook into Powermail 3.0.9 under OS X 10.0.2. All the extended characters were wrong. I mailed Sales ( I didn't know about Support then) about this problem the 9th of May 2001. Beside a confirming message, they never got back to me. Is this still a problem with taking the route over Outlook? The problem must be PM's, no? After all everything looked correct in Outlook. Or are there settings that I need to adjust? What can I do to make this *really* work? C H A R A C T E R P R O B L E M S I also had this extended character problem now when importing one particular folder, from my school where there are mostly Swedish posts. *Some* subject lines had erroneous characters, but not the messages themselves. What kind of problem is that and how can I work around it? BTW, would it be possible to import to 4.1 Demo and export in a useful format to 3.1.3 ?
