NETSCAPE GUI cannot find my emails

That's a relief.

1.Do you think compact the folders will help ?

2.Do you think re-installing Netscape would help?

3.If re-installing would help, should I use the latest version of Netscape or stick with the version currently in use (if I can find it again!!)

I have experienced these problems before and have been successful in resolving them by :

(1) compacting the folders.  

(2) there's no harm in reinstalling, but see (3).

(3) Check to see if you are running the latest version of Netscape, if not, download it from www.netscape.com and install it over the top of your existing installation.  When installing the program it asks whether you wish to store the setup files locally (rather than downloading them again) I usually say yes to this.

...as mentioned by you!  - It is a good idea to backup your message store before doing this and yes it is, as RR suggests, easy to restore back if something 'orrible 'appens.  

Compacting the folder is a good idea. However I am a little sceptic about installation of a new version. If nothing more, that's an invitation to incompatibilities (depending on your current version). A reinstall/upgrade is my last advice. Try getting it to work with the current version if possible at all. If it doesn't help, then upgrade. When upgrading, reply to the dialog by setup in yes when it asks whether you want to use the existing message store. When you are done with it, you can proceed to overwrite the new mesage store with the old one.

Another thing that can help is -- a scan of the HDD for physical corruption. Run SCANDISK and see if it tells you something. Perform this step before you compact the message store.

Sorry for the delay in getting back but the weekend got in the way!!

On to the business in hand;

I have taken a copy of the Mozilla folder

I ran scandisk on a standard check and no errors were reported

I then went to Netscape where there are four accounts

I shall call them A, B C & D

Each account has the expected folders (Inbox,Sent,Trash etc)

For account A .......
Inbox shows 207 items, non of these items are visible in the left pane
Sent shows 20 items all of which can be seen and opened
Trash had 744 items, non of these items are visible in the left pane

I tried the following on each of the folders........
right click on folder and select 'Compact'
RESULT
Inbox - nothing happened. By that I mean, no progress indicator appeared and everything remained as was and there was no error message
Sent - Saw the progress indicator and the job appeared to complete
Trash - nothing happened. By that I mean, no progress indicator appeared and everything remained as was and there was no error message


For account B .......
exactly the same results as Account A

Account C
Everything appears to work OK

Account D
Everything appears to work OK


Also tried searching the 'faulty' folders in account A & B for known body text. The search starts and does nothing and never looks like finishing !! I left it to run for an hour on one oof the folders and it gave no indication of either finding anything or of a fault of any kind. So, I stopped it.

It looks to me like the Netscape application 'thinks' everything is OK but. somehow, the file used to store the messages has been corrupted. I don't know enough about Netscape to say if there is a folder for each account but does anyone know how it stores messages (what file extension) and if they are 'readable' as in text based?

I have trawled all the PAQ's in this forum (and there were lots..) but nothing cropped up that seemed similar to my prob.

If this is a very active email account it is very possible for the search to take over an hour - leave it running overnight!  If it starts and looks as if it is doing nothing, yes, leave it running.  It's not always how many emails are currently in there that determines how badly it needs compacting, it is the continual deletion and insertion of emails that eventually make the mailbox look structurally like a map of Wookey Hole.

left it to run for 8 hours, nothing returned

I have tried scandisk but the machine locksup and requires a reset. I have to admit it is an old machine but it still appears to work OK. I am at the point now where I have re-installed Netscape 6.1B and some of the message folders are now viewable (previously they showed nothing in the left pane although the folder had a value for read/unread content) but the main Inbox I am after is still not showing the messages. The folder count for the Inbox shows 207 (10 unread) but nothing in the left hand pane.
What I have noticed is that if I open the preview pane and then click on the Inbox I can see what is obviously a Netscape homepage appear
If I go to a one of the folders which is viewable and click on it once then the messages in that folder are selectable via the left hand pane. Selecting a message then provides a preview of its content in the preview pane. If I now go back to my 'faulty' inbox and click on it once nothing happens and the preview pane stills shows the last viewed message from the previous good folder. If I next double click on the 'faulty' inbox the preview pane seems to contain this picture of the Netscape home page again. I have checked it is not the current 'live' home page. I can only surmise that it is a mail that is in the 'faulty' inbox and that this may be what is causing the problem?

If I go to the other account which also has a 'Faulty' inbox, the same thing happens. Is it possible that there is a mail in both these inboxes (from Netscape) containing HTML which is causing the messages in the inbox not to be visible??!!

One other thing i have discovered during this trauma is that each amail account has its own folder under the Mozilla structure and the name of the folder is taken from the user account name i.e. AccountA.

Within this 'account' folder are further files representing each mail folder in the account i.e.
Inbox
Sent
MyMail
etc...

I have opened one of these files using a text editor and it is 'text' based. Only thing I need to know now is, how do I get to the attachments??

Will carry on trying anything I can think of but any suggestions welcome.

Finally, at one point i thought i had found the problem, right clicking a mail folder aloows you to select properties, from there you can see a selection for language and i found this was set to Arabic. I checked a 'good' folder and this was set to Western ISO. I went back to my faulty folder and tried to change its property to Western ISO also but there must be a bug in the pick list because it doesn't display fully and runs of the bottom of the screen. If you try and scroll down it doesn't move up so you can't see where in the listbox you have got to. What I then tried was changing a 'good' folder to 'Arabic' as this was at the top oof the listbox and selectable. It had no effect so another Red Herring. What a nightmare.

btw Does anyone know how to stop Netscape bringing up seperate windows for each mail opened? This one has been driving me mad because as part of my investigations I have to keep switching between 'good' mail folders back to the 'faulty' one in order to see what effect there have been to any changes I have made. After a couple of minutes, my taskbar has multiple windows on it!! I have been through all the options and cannot find anything that says "Open each message in the SAME window"

The preview pane is I think the design team at Netscape thinking "Hmm we have an empty window here, what can we fill it with?"  This is, I would say, totally separate from the content of the email box while showing the home page.  It looks as if you are seeing a cached version of the Netscape website.

I'm sorry that you waited in vain - waiting usually works, but not in your case.  It sounds like you have a problem which is going to be difficult to resolve using the EE medium.  Your question regarding the attachments: they should be visible as a series of letters and numbers set off from the text by a Boundary (a row of dashes, a serial Id and the word Boundary).  These letters and numbers are the attachment coded in MIME form and can be decoded using a MIME Decode, this is viable if you have a few important attachments, but not practical with a large number of emails.  In many cases you will see the email is in three parts: plain text, html, and any attachment in encoded format.

If you have done a scandisk after booting up in DOS mode (F8 whilst booting the pc up, then choosing DOS mode) and this hangs the pc then I think you have a duff hard drive, this could be part of Netscape's problem.

I intially thought thought the harddrive was duffed up but I then expected that I would not be able to open the Inbox file and would get an error message from the OS but it opened OK and I was able to wander through it without problem. The bottom line here is that there are about 10 PDF's which were attachments to mails in the primary account inbox and I would like to recover them. Will plod on and your support and guidance is much appreciated. Watch this space....or in this case watch the blank message window pane!!

You could run some disk recovery tools to see if the Inbox can be recovered, as a bye-product of hard drives going defective, sometimes it's the pointer tables that point to the actual files have got corrupted and they just need to be made to point back to the correct place.  This corruption might well be patchy across the hard drive, so some files will be ok, others won't.

the final answer was kind of a workaround...
I imported the folders into Outlook and they were intact!? I now use Outlook as my mail client and have removed Netscape (uninstall)
Thanks to all those who contributed. Not sure how I close this now as it looks like the solution is mine but people hav ehelped me work this through so I think they should get a share of the points.