For more detailed information about the enhancements provided with this release (including screen shots and videos) check out What's New
Important Messages:
(see “Known Issues”)
Known Issues:
Attention: In testing DAT-MAIL Prep’s mail.dat merge and split functions have been found to create invalid mail.dat files in some cases, particularly when the files contain mother pallets and multiple segments. If your company uses either the Merge or Split functions, it is recommended that you do not install this latest version of DAT-MAIL Prep and continue using your current version of DAT-MAIL Prep until the problem is resolved.
This unfortunately has the consequence that mail.dat files from presort to be merged or split using DAT-MAIL Prep will need to remain formatted as 19-1. DAT-MAIL itself will still be able import and process these files (and 21-1 files from other sources) for the January 2021 Rate Case as well as export to the 21-1 format.
Enhancements:
T19477, B19949, B20084, B20133: Changes have been made in support of the new Mail.dat 21-1 Specification.
T19839, T19757, T19840, T19756, T19841: Changes have been made in support of the January 2021 Rate Case, including new printing procedures for 3600-FM, 3602-R/N, 3600-PM, 3541-R/N, and 3605 postage statements.
T19838: The DAT-MAIL Prep Status Log has been updated to notify the user that you cannot merge files with different Mail.dat versions.
T19870: Changes were made to the DAT-MAIL Prep merge function to allow a result file to be produced when the mail.dat files to be merged are individual mail.dat files containing both PDR and PBC or when some files to be merged contain PDR while other files in the same merge contain PBC. The option ‘Keep PDR when generating PBC’ has been removed, since there is no benefit in keeping the PDR after generating the PBC. The following rules for PDR and PBC are followed when DAT-MAIL Prep (or Scheduler) merge files: 1. When ‘Generate PBC from PDR data’ is ON the merge will produce only the PBC for the merged result. 2. When ‘Generate PBC from PDR data’ is OFF the merge will keep and merge whatever files/records are included.
Bug Fixes:
B19817, B19819: The Split and Merge functions were not processing when ‘Validate Input Files’ was set to ‘OFF’ or unchecked – this has been fixed.
B19821: In testing the DAT-MAIL Prep Split function it was found that the processing did not complete in some instances. This has been corrected.
B19976: In testing it was found that a splitter output file had a Full Service Indicator of "F" for all records in the CQT file, but this was not carrying over to SEG-1146 as it should have. This has been fixed.
B20038: An error message on startup was added when the MS SQL service is unassigned, not running or otherwise not available.
B20131: A correction has been made so that temporary folders used during Merge processing are always removed as part of the process. Left over temp folders had been found at times during testing.
B20146: The merge file order and merge output version options were not visible on the DAT-MAIL Prep Merger window because they were being hidden by the output group. This has been corrected.
B19823: A splitter issue with misaligned data found when the file uses a Unix-style end line of '\n' has been fixed.
