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Old December 7th, 2005, 10:57 AM
Ed Plowman Ed Plowman is offline
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Default mail.msg didn't separate some msgs!

What is the marker that Tap uses to keep msgs separate rather than combining many into a single msg?

I was using my trusty old reliable WP Office Editor to clean up my mail.msg file. I must have hit a wrong key; when I resaved, deleted the mail.~msg file, and went back into Tap, all of my msgs between Nov. 22 and Dec. 6 were now listed as a single post. All msgs prior to Nov. 22 were correctly indexed, and all following Dec. 6.

In reading, I can work my way down through the last Nov. 22 msg using the PgDn key. All the posts are there. Any reply, of course, would be to the Nov. 22 post.

I went back into WP Editor and closely examined the Nov. 22 and 23 posts. There were no weird codes lurking between the msgs. The four lines in each "envelope" were structured identically to all the preceding ones (that work): at least two hard returns followed by #:<space> at the beginning of Line 1, date preceded by four blank spaces on second line, Sb:<space>, and Fm:<space>.

I had thought these four lines were key to Tap keeping the msgs separated and indexed.

Any idea how I can convince Tap all the messages in question are separate ones?

ed p.
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Old December 7th, 2005, 03:15 PM
Judy G. Russell Judy G. Russell is offline
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The keys you indicate (#, spaces, etc.) are the usual markers, yes, but what may have happened is the insertion of WP codes somewhere in the document. Can you search for and delete anything other than ASCII characters? It's the act of saving as anything other than a plain ASCII / DOS document that usually is the culprit.
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Old December 7th, 2005, 06:39 PM
Ed Plowman Ed Plowman is offline
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Judy,

Nope. No codes. I NEVER load mail.msg in a word processor. Pure ASCII. I used WP's ASCII Editor to look at all the codes AND, for good measure, VEdit to look for both binary and hex codes. No formatting codes, no extra spaces or HRts where they don't belong. Weird. Loading just the affected portion of file as a test --still no go. Guess I just need to learn to live with it.

Thanks.

ed p.

Last edited by Ed Plowman; December 7th, 2005 at 06:41 PM. Reason: Delete unwanted word
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Old December 7th, 2005, 08:27 PM
Judy G. Russell Judy G. Russell is offline
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That's weird. Can you email me that part of the file? I'd be happy to take a look at it. Use the address jgr (at) tapcis.com.
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Old December 8th, 2005, 07:48 AM
heinz57g heinz57g is offline
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ed, how long is the entire file? i have had once something rather similar, but with and extremely large .MSG file.

something, whatever it was, had tried to insert a control code into the ASCII text.

this was long long ago, but what i recalled doing was keeping the corrupted old file, and making copies of it in splits: devided it (manually) into 6 sep parts, named them all differently, loaded them back into TAPCIS. found the one part that would not show properly, tried to find the reason, couldnt.

split that bad one down to three even smaller parts, and bingo, found the corrupted mssg.

then looked for that mssg and the code in the orginal file, corrected it (as i was not sure, i think i deleted a few lines of a not-so important mssg completely), and back i was to normal.

hope i remembered this right, it was surely 6-8 years ago.

greetings - heinz -

Last edited by heinz57g; December 8th, 2005 at 07:55 AM.
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Old December 8th, 2005, 11:22 AM
Ed Plowman Ed Plowman is offline
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Heinz,

Thank you VERY much. What you did is what I've started doing, and will finish on the weekend. I just looked at the first six lines (the envelope and blank spaces) of each of the posts in and preceding the section in question. Found nothing with binary and hex reading, but now, thanks to the clue I think you dropped, I need to look at the entire contents of each of those files to see if a rogue code is embedded there. I isolated that section into a separate mailtest.msg file but still the same problem. So there definitely is something lurking somewhere. My next step will be to strip out the Internet headers ("routing slips," I call them). then test again. (Tap doesn't care about the headers, so that won't be an issue.) I'll report back later.

And yes, you may be onto something re. the very long .msg file; mine is 7 megs, July-Dec. I keep it somewhat cleaned out weekly (using my EDitor macros to move news files for my archives to various folders). The error appeared immediately following a clean-out session on Nov. 22. Which is why I'm guessing an alien code slipped in somewhere.

The fact that all incoming emails now view and are indexed properly makes me think there must be TWO codes, a beginning one near the the Nov. 22 msg and and ending one near the Dec. 6 msg. Otherwise, how would Tap know where to end the all-in-one Nov. 22 msg (encompassing within it two weeks worth of separate emails)?

I hate mysteries on deadline days!

ed p.
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Old December 8th, 2005, 01:26 PM
Judy G. Russell Judy G. Russell is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ed Plowman
you may be onto something re. the very long .msg file; mine is 7 megs, July-Dec.
Seven MB shouldn't even cause a hiccup, Ed -- I've had files easily twice that long without an issue.
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Old December 8th, 2005, 02:52 PM
heinz57g heinz57g is offline
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ed, as judy says, 7megs alone cannot be the problem, mine are over 20meg long, and only far above this then do i notice problems.

splitting the MSG file can be done anyhwere between mssgs, TAPCIS does not seen to worry about extra empty lines anywhere at the beginnig or end. or none.

so just split your file into as many as you feel like, import them into tapcis, and disregard the ones that import fine.

one of them then needs attention ... great fun.

greetings - heinz -
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Old December 8th, 2005, 04:35 PM
Ed Plowman Ed Plowman is offline
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Well, yes, my mail.msg file went as high as 26 megs a couple of years ago, and I've never seen this particular problem in Tapcis before. However, I do my moving and cleaning up with the old Word Perfect Office text editor, "ED.EXE," and it sometimes gets quirky and awfully slow with large files. I try to keep mail.msg below 10 megs for this reason. I suspect ED is at the bottom of the problem. So far, I've found no foreign ASCII codes in the section in question.

Judy, I'll try to take time off from deadlines tomorrow or the weekend and send you just the section under discussion, including two or three posts fore and aft. It will come zipped as an attachment named PLOWMAN.ZIP. containing only one file: PLOWMAN.MSG.

Thanks.

ed p.
ed p.
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Old December 8th, 2005, 09:20 PM
Judy G. Russell Judy G. Russell is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ed Plowman
Judy, I'll try to take time off from deadlines tomorrow or the weekend and send you just the section under discussion, including two or three posts fore and aft. It will come zipped as an attachment named PLOWMAN.ZIP. containing only one file: PLOWMAN.MSG.
No rush, whenever you get a chance.
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Old December 9th, 2005, 02:57 AM
heinz57g heinz57g is offline
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ed, and splitting the file did not narrow it down to a few mssgs only? i know it is work ...

in some of my cases, it was not an added control code somewhere, but rather a missing (or some missing) empty lines.

the end of one, and the beginning of the next mssg in .MSG usually looks like this:

...
[TAPCIS: Message was sent to 1 address]

#: 6760 (C) S0/CompuServe Mail
21-Oct-97 13:10:27
...

the important thing for TAPCIS to find is the blank line between (and maybe the #: starting a new mssg). if that one is not there, the entire file gets screwed (literally) up.

i had files which ended up like this, several mssgs in a row:

...
[TAPCIS: Message was sent to 1 address]#: 6760 (C)S0/CompuServe Mail

21-Oct-97 13:10:27
...

and that totally blew it. inserting the blank row manually between ] and # brought everything back to normal.

greetings - heinz -
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Old December 9th, 2005, 09:02 PM
Ed Plowman Ed Plowman is offline
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Heinz (and Judy):

Heinz, the "[Tapcis: message was sent..." line is displayed in the outgoing MAIL.SAV files, not incoming MAIL.MSG files. I have no problem with MAIL.SAV.

Here is where I am so far. I have NO idea whatsoever can be wrong. I have a few more tests to try on the weekend.

1. The last file that indexed correctly was dated Nov. 22; =all= msgs between that one and the fifth Dec. 6 email were seen by Tapcis as part of the Nov. 22 msg!

2. In TEST #1, I deleted all msgs up to the Nov. 22 one, and all
following the last Dec. 6 one. Same result.

3. I next gradually removed the msgs before and after the Nov. 22 one, up to Dec. 5. On these tests (#2-6), Tapcis would recognize ONLY the final Dec. 6 msg. None in the Nov. 23 - Dec. 5 timeframe.

Both sets of tests began with no Tap index file for the test .msg
file. Nevertheless, I did a LOAD VIEW -- ALL FILES option. Still no go. It just saw only the final msg.

Finally, in TEST #7, I removed all but =six= msgs and much of the text in several of those msg. Again, Tap would recognize only the final one (I had deleted the previous final one with the Dec. 6 date.).

And no strange codes seen when viewing with binary and hex editors.

It sure is baffling.

My main MAIL.MSG file is still in place, and Tap recognizes all current incoming msgs as separate ones except the affected ones between Nov. 22 and Dec. 6. These are all lumped under a Nov. 22 one.

ed p.
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Old December 9th, 2005, 11:38 PM
Judy G. Russell Judy G. Russell is offline
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At this point all I can suggest is that I can take a look -- there's SOMETHING in there for sure, and it could be that another pair of eyes can see it.
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Old December 10th, 2005, 07:08 AM
heinz57g heinz57g is offline
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ed, baffling is the right word. just now looked at my present MAIL.MSG file, and some (renamed) others, as far back as 1995, and all and everyone is the same: 90% of all mails end with ''[TAPCIS: Message was sent to xx addresses]", followed by a blank line, and then starting again with "#: 6760 (C) S0/CompuServe Mail".

nothing at all to do with MAIL.SAV.

there are some mails that do NOT end with the 'sent to xx adresses', but have just a blank line, so i assume the trigger is actually the blank and the '#: '.

how come none of our real TAPCIS-surgeons here in the forum know?

can only offer the same judy offered: send me the file, and i will have, for sure, figured this out within a day or two, and send it back to you. i have some old editors that mark rogue codes or missing <CR>s in color, and that, basically, MUST be the problems somewhere.

greetings - heinz -
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Old December 10th, 2005, 12:03 PM
Judy G. Russell Judy G. Russell is offline
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Quote:
how come none of our real TAPCIS-surgeons here in the forum know?
We can't know what we can't see...
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Old December 10th, 2005, 03:22 PM
Ed Plowman Ed Plowman is offline
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Heinz and Judy,

I think I'm on the trail of something: possibly a corruption in my .MSG file itself, or in my copy of Tapcis. When I do CTRL-I while viewing, Tapcis =sometimes= shows an "E" (for Error) or an "E+" (whatever that means!) next to a particular file in the index window (though not always). Sometimes, it also shows both a 'U' and a 'u' (Uu) opposite a specific file; it should be one or the other, showing a file as having been Unread =or= Read. But again, this happens only some of the time with that same file.

I'll not send you the file segment in question until after I've loaded that section into WP Dos 6.2, resaved the text file as a WP file, and then have WP resave the WP version of the file as an ASCII text file, then test again with Tapcis. If it fails, I'll let you have a look to see if your copy of Tap treats it normally. If so, that probably means I need to re-install Tap.

Thanks for your interest.

ed p.
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Old December 10th, 2005, 03:37 PM
Ed Plowman Ed Plowman is offline
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Heinze,

You are correct: it is the #:<space> at the beginning of a line preceded by a blank space or two (hard returns) that Tapcis uses to separate msgs in its indexing system,

The reason you see

[TAPCIS: Message was sent to 1 address]

at the end of your msgs in MAIL.MSG is because in SETUP |MAIL |File Copies of Messages you Send is marked either MSG or BOTH. Which means a copy of a msg you send is tacked onto your MAIL.MSG file. I've marked my File Copies option as SAV, meaning copies are saved in MAIL.SAV but not MAIL.MSG.

Thanks for your interest. I'll report back what I eventually find.

ed p.
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Old December 10th, 2005, 04:46 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by heinz57g
just now looked at my present MAIL.MSG file, and some (renamed) others, as far back as 1995, and all and everyone is the same: 90% of all mails end with ''[TAPCIS: Message was sent to xx addresses]", followed by a blank line, and then starting again with "#: 6760 (C) S0/CompuServe Mail".

nothing at all to do with MAIL.SAV.
Well, that question, at least, I can answer: It depends on how you have your options for MAIL set (Setup|Mail); specifically, whether you elect to save file copies of outgoing messages to the SAV file, the MSG file, to both, or to neither.

Ooops, I see that Ed already answered that question. Oh, well.

--Lindsey
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Old December 10th, 2005, 11:22 PM
Ed Plowman Ed Plowman is offline
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All,

Well, my next step will be to re-install Tapcis. Hope I remember to get all the pieces in the right order. It's been a long time....

Lack-of-progress report: (1) I copied and saved as a separate file (MAILTST1.MSG) the 178 msgs between Nov. 20 and Dec. 7 in MAIL.MSG. (2) Once again, Tap saw all msgs from Nov. 22 to Dec. 6 as a single file. (3) Next, I loaded the test file into a word processor, resaved it as a wp file, and exited. I took care to preserve the line lengths by setting the margins accordingly.
(4) Then I reloaded the wp file, and re-saved it as an ASCII plain text file, MAILTST2.MSG. My thought was this would clean out any corruption in my original text editor file. (5) This time, hooray, Tapcis read and indexed the file correctly, showing each msg separately! (6) So, I loaded the entire MAIL.MSG file (renamed MAILTST3.MSG), minus the Nov.20-Dec. 7 segment, into the word processor, resaved it as a wp file, exited, loaded the wp version of the file, imported the rejuvenated Nov.20-Dec.7 segment into the correct dated location, and re-saved the whole business as an ASCII file, MAILTST4.MSG.

(7) My joy was short-lived. When I had Tap read MAILTST4.MSG for the first time, I saw that it indexed one of the Nov. 22 msgs into the middle of the Nov. 9 msgs. (The text file had the correct order, of course.)

(8) Then when I worked my way down to the last Nov. 22 msg, Tap did what it had done originally: indexed all the msgs between that msg and a Dec. 6 msg as a single Nov. 22 msg. All the text could be read by doing PgDn.

Son-of-a-gun. Back to where I had started and what had brought me to the forum.

(9) I exited, then had Tap read again MAILTST2.MSG, the 178 msgs between Nov. 20 and Dec. 7. Once again, Tap read and indexed the entire section correctly -- everything was a separate msg.

So-o-o, Tap reads that segment correctly when it's by itself, but can't do it when it is part of the entire file.

Str-r-r-r-ange. This is a first-ever for me.

I'll report on what happens following the re-install of Tap, but it won't be right away. I have some more end-of-year copy to get out the door.

ed p.

Last edited by Ed Plowman; December 10th, 2005 at 11:29 PM. Reason: Add missing word
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Old December 11th, 2005, 03:40 AM
heinz57g heinz57g is offline
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reinstalling TAPCIS wont help you. and by the way, if you do a quick-and-dirty installation into another folder, or even onto another computer, it will hardly take 2 minutes.

that it was a corrupted MSG file, we have said from the beginning, nothing really new. and if the part-file reads ok, but not when it is attached to the rest, shows a corruption right where the files meet (a missing blank line could be enough).

lets get back to a simplified statement:

- MSG file containing mssg 1-100 shows fault somewhere betw mssg 50-60
- part A MSG file containing 1-33 reads fine
- part B MSG file containing 34-66 reads fine
- part C MSG file containing 67-100 reads fine
- combination of A+B+C again corrupt

there is no point that you pass to me or judy the files which you have already moved thru any of your wordprocessors, however little they might have done to it. somewhere is a hiccup, and to find it with something we are not too familiar with, and might itself been faulty, is as good as impossible.

with all the inspecting, searching and changing you have already done, pls do not forget the main thing TAPCIS was (IS!) famous for: it always worked.

meaning it was based on rather simple, but solid rules, and simple, but solid programming. what TAPCIS would do in a 25k EXE files, nowaday computer wizards would, under WINDOWS XXXPPP XL ver10.0, need 300MB for, if! and you would still get a blue screen if you had just looked at you nephews pictures and then (not while) wanted to read your mails right after, occasionally.

as judy says, its impossible to judge if we dont see it, right in front of us. and there, only the old original TAPCIS *.MSG file makes sense (renaming, but only renaming, would be fine).

i can assure you 1000% that not even as much as a glance at the content of yr mssg will be done. i am in a highly confidential business since years, and have learned to switch part of my mind off when i see things i am not supposed to see.

but i can also assure you, that both judy and me would have a perfectly working file back to you within a day or two. we are all really trying to help, but you have to give us a proper chance. and while this is done, you take a cup of coffee, and quietly work on your end-of-year copy.

greetings - heinz -

PS: the ''SAV file, the MSG file, to both, or to neither'' adjustment i did 10++ years ago, so for me it looked normal.

Last edited by heinz57g; December 11th, 2005 at 03:56 AM.
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