[pmmail-list] Remote message store

[Ralph Cohen]

I successfully ran PMMail/2 and PMMail Win with a shared message base
on the OS/2 HPFS drive for a couple of years.  In addition to mapping
the data drive as others have mentioned, I modified the PMMail Win code
to get around a problem which dramatically slowed access to the
messages on the windows machine.  Here's an explanation about how to
make the modification that I copied from someone else a few years ago. 
Be sure to make a backup of pmmail.exe before you begin.

==============

The speed problem of PMMail under Win98SE / Win2000 when running from a
mapped network drive is NOT a problem of Windows but one of PMMail:
Every time a message is selected for reading (Preview pane or double
click) PMMail splits header and body of the mail and transforms the
body to rich text format which is then loaded into the viewer. The
implementation of this transformation is very poor, since PMMail
converts line by line instead of reading the mail body in, converting
it in memory and writing it back to disk. This causes heavy network I/O
load! Since 98SE and 2000 cahce network file I/O in a different manner
from the other Windows versions, this behaviour leads to trouble. The
solution is to let PMMail create the .rtf intermediate file on the
local disk. Unfortunately it has no setting for it nor does it obey the
standard TMP environment variable. So you have to patch the binary:

Get a Hex editor, close PMMail, search for the string ".\temp\temp.rtf"
in the file pmmailw.exe and replace it everywhere it occurs with the
string "c:\tmp\temp.rtf". Create the directory c:\tmp, if not already
there and start PMMail again. Enjoy the speed...

==============

Ralph Cohen



On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 09:51:38 -0700, Paul Dhuse wrote:

>I run PMMail/2 on one machine and PMMail windows (on Win 2000) on another.
>
>Is it possible to point the Win PMMail to the mail store on the PMMail/2 machine 
>(assuming, of course, that I get Win 2000 to OS/2 file sharing again)?
>
>How is this done?
>
>Thanks.
>
>-- 
>Famous last words?  "It seemed like a good idea at the time ..."
>
>Paul R. Dhuse       Mirapoint, Inc.        (408) 720-3783
>
>