Negative Amount of Activesync Inbox Unread Messages

[Stealthboy]

I've had this problem ever since I started using Pocket Hotmail to access my Hotmail email account on the PocketPC. If the Inbox program get shut down while downloading Hotmail email and Activesync is also trying to sync up new messages, the problem begins. In the Activesync inbox, there will be some (equal to the number of unsynced Activesync messages on the PC) 1k messages with no subject that have [no recipients] as the sender. If these messages are deleted on the pocketpc, you will then get a negative unread message count. The today screen only displays unread messages with the unread count is greater than zero.

There have been many postings about this same problem in the microsoft.public.pocketpc.* groups on Usenet, but no solutions have been given other than a hard reset. Deleting and creating a new partnership doesn't seem to fix this. I've tried digging through the pocketpc registry and database files and haven't found the location of the counter that gets out of whack when the black messages are deleted. In the meantime (until I do a hard reset), I've just left the 1k messages in my inbox on the pocketpc unread so that the count is still correct if I just ignore these blank messages. Does anyone know where the counter is for unread activesync messages that is displayed on the status line on the bottom of the screen in inbox?

[Stealthboy]

I just received this solution from Pieter Hooftman. It does require registry editing to fix the issue. I'm on WM2003 and haven't had the problem anymore, but I thought I'd post this for other users...

I found the counter.

Using Phatware Hdbexplorer, i explored the pmailfolders database. All it's records have one or two TEXT fields in which you can find the name of the folder. In my case, the record which showed Inbox in one TEXT field referred to fldr100118a in the other TEXT field. fldr100118a is another database, which contains (among others) ULONG fields. The ULONG field just preceding the DATE field contained a value the same as my unread counter. After backing up the database, i changed the value to 0, and voila!
Phatware's dbexplorer can be downloaded from www.phatware.com in a fully functional 30-day trail version, which i used. I also managed to delete
+1600 obsolete messages this way, which showed in a inboxfolder, but had
+no
envelope icon in front of them. That resulted in not being able to open or delete those messages. I carefully removed the records from pmailfolders, and the databases fdlr... they referred to, and all was fine (soft reset required afterwards). Also, activesync screwed up one time, because one subfolder of Inbox had propagated itself 350 times , causing 350 nested subfolders of Inbox, creating 350 records in pmailfolders with 350 fldr....
databases with 0 records.... BTW, the fldr... databases contain the headers of the email messages, the body texts messages are stored in \windows\messaging

I have no access to a newsserver, so maybe if this was helpful, you can post it for me in the right thread.

greetings from Pieter Hooftman, MDE (Mobile Device Enthousiast)