Why Are These Files Here?

tdwilliams · 01-22-05, 09:20 AM

I just noticed that I have about 15 files in my Windows\Messaging folder. They appear to be e-mail message files.

I do not understand what these files are doing here because currently I only have 4 messages in my inbox. Nothing in deleted items or drafts, or any other email folders. Some of the files appear to be emails that I deleted some time ago.

Anybody know why these files remain in the Windows\Messaging folder? They remain even after a sync.

Thanks.

Don't Panic! · 01-22-05, 10:05 AM

Got any file names? But you can just delete everything in that folder without a problem anyway, you'll lose your current messages too though.

tdwilliams · 01-22-05, 10:11 AM

They all have file names that look like the following:

05001ed21000001f.mpb

I figured that I could delete them and also assumed that would mean that I would lose my e-mails. I may do that but I am curious as to why these files seem to remain in this folder even after deleting the e-mails completely. Thanks.

Don't Panic! · 01-22-05, 10:35 AM

Fellow MS MVP, Mobile Devices Sven had this to say about them on the microsoft.public.pocketpc newsgroup back in 2001;

Actually I dug around some more. I can drag a .mpb file to my desktop and
open it with notepad. They contain the text of a message, which I can find
in my inbox, but no header information. That tells me there is some other
place the header info is kept with a reference to the bodies in .mpbs. I
have about a dozen .mpbs that have a 0 byte size and have nothing in them. A
dozen is just about the discrepancies between the number of messages I show
in my inbox(s) and the number of files in the messaging folder. Hmm, orphan
mistakes? I haven't summoned up the garbanzos to delete the 0 byte files
out of there yet. I suppose I will sooner or later. Just don't want to
confuse an important system db unneccesarily

Marc Zimmerman another MS MVP said Don't deltete them back in 2002.

I've safely removed everything out of messaging in the past so I'm sticking with deleting them is fine. Pretty cool that you can open them on your desktop though. I didn't know that.

tdwilliams · 01-22-05, 02:50 PM

Cool--I dragged them to the desktop and opened them with notepad. They were old e-mails that for some reason were still being maintained in the windows\messaging folder.

I deleted the ten that did not match anything in any of my mail folders and kept the others. Everything seems fine afterward.

For a further test, I deleted some newly received e-mail on the PPC. Befoe I did that, I saw that those files were in the windows\messaging folder on the PPC. I then deleted those emails using pmail and those files did remove themselves from the windows\messaging folder.

I suspect that those other stray files were the remnants from when I was only having pmail bring in headers and then downloading the remainder of the message. Just a guess, no evidence to back it up.