Dear User:

Welcome to the Demo version of PMDBM - the Personal-Mail DataBase Manager.

This, the third upload of version 1.0á, has now been tested by several
people, on several different hardware platforms and a few bugs have been
found, reported and fixed. I have spent a lot of time personally trying
to find any problems, as have Lisa Powell, Colin Wright, Jonathan Harley
and Eric Decker. I can happily report that all seems fine. Nontheless,
it is still a beta version and there are a lot of different systems out
there. As far as I know, it hasn't yet been run on an 8086 (if you're
doing so, I'd love to hear back from you!!)

For those more cautious folks (like me), if given it's own directories,
PMDBM is perfectly safe to use. It will not cause problems for your other
files, though it is possible that the integrity of it's own files could
conceivably become corrupt in some circumstances. I've included a copy
of ISAMREPR.EXE. which is a file repair utility from Microsoft. If PMDBM
is terminated abnormally, ISAMREPR will have to be run before PMDBM will
be able to read it's files on the *.HDR file (files if you have more
than one MessageBase).  This is a precautionary measure to ensure the
file's integrity. To run ISAMREPR, you need only supply filename.HDR
as a parameter on the run line, to repair the file. The other files will
be fine.

Please do let me know of any problems you encounter. I will upload
updated versions as soon as possible after people report back on any
problems.

While previous uploads held 2 versions of the program, the ISAM routines
require lots of memory. After struggling quite a bit to try and
accomodate systems without expanded memory, I've learned that the only
way PMDBM can support such systems is to continually open and close the
ISAM files. The performance degradation which this causes makes all
further attempts to support these systems futile. While I will need to
convert to a different ISAM library in order to provide compatibility
with the forthcoming Windows version, for the time being at any rate,
support for systems without EMS (expanded memory) will not be feasible
and only 1 version of the program is now included.

This version should run on any IBM compatible 80286+ system, with CGA
and a minimum of 64k of expanded memory. When reporting problems, please
do let me know which version you are using.

Before I go, I do ask that you read the documentation, especially where
it concerns configuration. PMDBM is easy to use and you'll quickly
become familiar with it. It is also easy to configure, but there are
still specific requirements and the documentation can help avoid
mistakes. In the long run, reading the docs may save you some grief. One
CRITICAL configuration factor is the number of file handles available.
PMDBM uses overlays and also opens a number of files concurrently. You
MUST have a FILES= statement in your CONFIG.SYS and it's value has to be
large enough else an overlay may not load and you may end up needing to
use ISAMREPR <g>. If you only run one application at a time, you should
have FILES set to a minimum of 10 (unless your other applications have
higher requirements). A setting of 15 would be even better. Reserving
File handles does not use very much system memory at all so it's
certainly better to be safe than sorry.

And finally, thank you for taking the time to evaluate this product. I
hope you find it both useful and enjoyable. Your comments, whether
positive or negative, will be appreciated.

Les Gyurky.
Sep 5, 1991.