[Upgrading, Modifying and Unlocking] Vivalis:
Part 2: Starting Position and Findings

Starting position:

I had a Sprite backup of my messages (SMS, MMS, emails) from my old P3300 which was running on WM 6.0. As the P3300 was not working anymore, I had no other option than using this backup on my new Touch Pro 2. So, I tried to restore all mail-related items from this backup using Sprite - which created the above and below mentioned problems.

Until and including WM 6.0, MMS were saved in a separate account called "MMS". In WM 6.1, MMS are stored in the same account as the SMS ("SMS/MMS"). An existing MMS account in a cemail.vol file from WM 6.0 or earlier that is restored on WM 6.1 is not visible.

WM 6.1 introduces the new "Messages Threading" feature. Threading organizes received and sent text messages (and MMS because they're in the same account now) into threaded conversations.

Findings:

I have no clue why my SMS did not show up in the contacts of TF3D. I tried some approaches that I found on the Web and that might have been able to solve my problem, e.g. clearing all SMS/MMS and restore the messages with PIM Backup (link to proposal), or renaming cemail.vol resp. deleting it by placing a shortcut in the startup folder (link to proposal). None of these worked.

The cemail.vol file (container of all messages of all types) cannot be renamed or copied or moved. The only possibility I found is MortScript that can copy/backup the file during startup of the device before WM gets hold of the file. You can find the script itsself below.

In Pocket Outlook (Messaging), the MMS folder was gone. However, the folder showed up as an account in the email-tab of TF3D with sender, date and headline, but tapping on the message had no effect. PIM Backup (with action "Backup") also showed the MMS folder with all the subfolders and the correct number of MMS.

I could not find a solution or registry tweak to make the MMS account show up in Outlook.

The hidden WM6-MMS-account might look like corrupt to WM 6.1. If so, there could be a relation between the MMS issue and the problem of not having messages in a contact's messages tab because of old, "corrupt" data in the cemail.vol file. I have no proof that this assumption is true.

It is also possible that restoring an entire cemail.vol file somehow confuses the threading process in WM 6.1. I have no proof that this assumption is true.

PIM Backup is currently (V 2.8) not able to backup and restore MMS due to proprietary binary saving by Arcsoft's MMS Composer.

If you try to restore MMS with PIM Backup, the MMS shows up as MMS, but has no content when you open it. It seems as using PIM Backup on MMS makes the reference to the MMS content (each MMS has a dat-file in \My Documents\UAContents\MMS UA\) being lost. Backing up and restoring cemail.vol as a whole keeps these references.

As far as I understand, PIM Backup backs up/restores messaging by reading/writing them via Outlook interface. This is a different approach to just copying/replacing the entire cemail.vol and might be the reason for the above mentioned loss of MMS reference: Using the Outlook interface, each restored MMS might look like a new incoming MMS to MMS Composer, so it creates a new reference number for the dat-file.

I found that the binary Arcsoft-MMS data in cemail.vol could be considered as irrelevant: If you rename an existing dat-file with the new reference number that is created for a MMS restored with PIM Backup, the content of the MMS is shown as it should. This even works with text-mode based PIM Backups where there is no binary data included at all.

The binary backup mode of PIM Backup is faster than the text mode, but the text mode has 2 advantages: 1) The backup file is a zip-file containing csv-text-files which you can extract, read and edit. 2) From my point of view, the text mode is more reliable, particularly in backing up and restoring emails' contents.

Using Pocket dbExplorer, I tried to have a look into the cemail.vol file and extracted some content. I judged it as not feasible to figure out the layouts and contents of the various databases and records in order to alter cemail.vol directly.