Inbox getting trashed

I have been running The Bat! for several years now, and most of the time the product is very stable. Every few months, however, I will get repeated Bat! error messages indicating memory reference problems. These notification boxes will not go away, and I am forced to close The Bat! from the Task Manager.

Usually, I can just restart the program and go on as usual. But sometimes my InBox gets trashed - meaning hundreds of messages are just "gone". A huge chunk, sometimes more than a thousand emails are wiped out.

When this happens, I inevitably take a look in the C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\The Bat!\i<account>\Inboxf older and see new files along side the standard MESSAGES.TBB and MESSAGES.TBN files. These are typically MESSAGES.BK1 and part0001.bin. The BK1 object size is that of the original Inbox TBB file prior to the crash. The part0001.bin file size represents the relative difference between the BK1 and the new TBB Inbox file (the one with all the missing emails).

It is abundantly clear that these two additional files represent some sort of "lost" data that was arbitrarily purged as part of a process to eliminated corrupted records. And I understand the need to clean things up to maintain stability in this type of situation.

When this happens, however, it is a royal pain in the arse to manual recreate/rebuild my Inbox from backups. There must be some way - perhaps through a special Ritlabs support utility - to manually extract messages from the BK1 or part00001.bin files. Otherwise, what is the point of generating these additional files?

Having such an utility would greatly improve my experience with The Bat!

Please advise ASAP.

Thanks and regards,

Stefan

It's not the best thing to do to store thousands of messages in a high traffic folder like the Inbox.
Each folder is basically a big file, as soon as one of those messages causes problems (like a virus) third party utilities like virus scanners may interfere with access to you folder, therefore causing the folder to go corrupt.
Furthermore messages you delete aren't removed from your folder, but merely marked as deleted. When you compact a folder then the deleted messages will be removed. Therefore folders can be larger than you'd suspect and as large files are easier to corru[t than small files, that's a hazard too.
The remedy for the second problem is to purge and compact all folders on exit or in cas you keep TB running for mul;tiple days on a row, to schedule a maintenance event that takes cre of daily purging and compacting.
The first problem can be solved by filtering (manually or autmatically) messgaes to separate folders, so that you won't have an obese inbox.

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Roelof Otten Guru Posts: 2963 Points: 5336 Rating: 61 Authority: 61 Joined: 19 September 2004	#2 0 18 January 2013 00:58:17 It's not the best thing to do to store thousands of messages in a high traffic folder like the Inbox. Each folder is basically a big file, as soon as one of those messages causes problems (like a virus) third party utilities like virus scanners may interfere with access to you folder, therefore causing the folder to go corrupt. Furthermore messages you delete aren't removed from your folder, but merely marked as deleted. When you compact a folder then the deleted messages will be removed. Therefore folders can be larger than you'd suspect and as large files are easier to corru[t than small files, that's a hazard too. The remedy for the second problem is to purge and compact all folders on exit or in cas you keep TB running for mul;tiple days on a row, to schedule a maintenance event that takes cre of daily purging and compacting. The first problem can be solved by filtering (manually or autmatically) messgaes to separate folders, so that you won't have an obese inbox. __________________________________ I'm just a user of The Bat! I don't work for Ritlabs.