How to Fix Corrupt Eudora Mailboxes

At 3:14 PM -0700 4/8/08, Edward Reid wrote:
>> Unfortunately, when I relaunched Eudora, all the messages in my Out
>> mailbox since 14-Feb-08 showed a recovered status (a ?) instead of
>> the correct status
>
>I don't leave messages in the Out box, partly because I figure using a
>highly volatile mailbox for long-term storage is asking for trouble, partly
>because that often results in a large file being backed up daily, partly
>because I find it cumbersome.

Yeah, historically I used to archive messages from my Out box every
month, but over the years I've let that time get longer and longer
because I often go into my Out box to get an email address or see
what I sent someone some time before. After this happened, I cleaned
all of 2007's sent mail out of my Out box and I've already had to go
back to the archive mailbox once to get something from December.

cheers... -Adam

--
Adam C. Engst, TidBITS Publisher <http://www.tidbits.com/adam/>

On 10-Apr-08, at 12:47 PM, Adam C. Engst wrote:
> Yeah, historically I used to archive messages from my Out box every
> month, but over the years I've let that time get longer and longer
> because I often go into my Out box to get an email address or see
> what I sent someone some time before. After this happened, I cleaned
> all of 2007's sent mail out of my Out box and I've already had to go
> back to the archive mailbox once to get something from December.

Because 12 months is a long time, Adam, I set up 2007 M~boxes, moving
files into them several months later. Ie. Jan - March 2007 goes
into its archive about September. I don't mind searching for things
older than six months.

I could improve on that by making copies for archiving while leaving
a whole year in the live Mboxes for Mail style searching ?

George

At 12:47 04/10/08 -0700, Adam C. Engst wrote:
>Yeah, historically I used to archive messages from my Out box every
>month, but over the years I've let that time get longer and longer
>because I often go into my Out box to get an email address or see
>what I sent someone some time before. After this happened, I cleaned
>all of 2007's sent mail out of my Out box and I've already had to go
>back to the archive mailbox once to get something from December.

Yes, but if instead you filter sent mail to a "sent-mail" mailbox (assuming
you want to avoid mixing it with received mail to reduce clutter when
looking at sent messages), then opening "sent-mail" is almost as easy as
opening Out. Not quite as easy, since Out is cmd-0. But doesn't Mac Eudora
allow you to assign cmd keys? I thought I remembered this being one way it
was better than Win Eudora. Thus one cmd-stroke either way.

Once you filter outgoing messages immediately to sent-mail, you almost
never open the Out box. The only reasons I open Out are 1) to revise a
message I just queued but which hasn't been sent yet (I do this too often),
or 2) to resume writing something I've closed to reduce clutter when I
wasn't going to work on it for a while. Once you *always* go to sent-mail
for archival stuff, you just get used to doing that instead of going to the
Out box, and you avoid using the highly volatile Out for archival storage.

Basically, I think you've grown accustomed to using your Out box as half
your archive, the sent half. I don't necessary recommend that you change,
since you are accustomed to it and not having any trouble beyond an
occasional, fairly simple mailbox recovery. However, I think that when
writing you should recognize that it's not a good practice to recommend to
others, even implicitly.

And yes, sent-mail (or in my case, "thismonth") gets moved to a long term
archive periodically. At present, my "thismonth" is really "this quarter",
but I haven't bothered to rename it. ;-) If you always want sent-mail to
have the last year of sent messages, then every quarter move messages more
than a year old to a quarterly archive. Or something like that. Or just let
it build up until it gets near 32K messages and then trim it. There are
multiple ways to set it up without abusing Out.

Edward
--
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

On 4/11/08 5:04 AM, "Edward Reid" wrote:

> At 12:47 04/10/08 -0700, Adam C. Engst wrote:
>> Yeah, historically I used to archive messages from my Out box every
>> month, but over the years I've let that time get longer and longer
>> because I often go into my Out box to get an email address or see
>> what I sent someone some time before. After this happened, I cleaned
>> all of 2007's sent mail out of my Out box and I've already had to go
>> back to the archive mailbox once to get something from December.
>
> Yes, but if instead you filter sent mail to a "sent-mail" mailbox (assuming
> you want to avoid mixing it with received mail to reduce clutter when
> looking at sent messages), \

Maybe I'm missing most of the issue, since I don't use Eudora and have never
even seen it but wouldn't filter rules to move sent items to the correct
folders be a lot easier than sifting through all sent items looking for an
particular email?

I use Entourage not because I love it but because I have office and it seems
to be powerful enough to do what I need. (I've use Mail too but it can't do
some of the filtering that I require, at least not 2 years ago) I have rules
set up for all my "important" people and folders for them as well. The
rules automatically move sent and received emails to the respective folders.
For the people I get *a lot* of email from/to I then have sub folders with
the year so the main folder doesn't get too heavy. No archiving, no real
problems. 1.7 GB database file. Backed up daily with 5 copies and 7 days
left on the server. No issues. It's POP so I even forward myself a copy of
everything I send so *they* are on the server as well. (A rule deletes those
in Entourage so I don't get flooded with duplicates)

For all the people so committed to Eudora one would think it can do such
trivial tasks. A thread comes up several times a year about issues with
Eudora and I always shrug my shoulders about how adamant some folks are
about their email program. Come on, it's not feeding the hungry or
anything.

Any how does any of this relate to corrupt mailboxes? Ya got me. I lost
about a month of email 3 years ago when my Entourage DB got corrupted,
that's when I switched to my current backup plan. It's been fine ever
since, save for having to rebuild it from time to time. After which it
likes to download EVERYTHING from the server. That would be a pain but I
have a filter for that too. As my 6 year old son says, "easy cheesy lemon
squeezy".

Adam

At 2:04 AM -0700 4/11/08, Edward Reid wrote:
>Yes, but if instead you filter sent mail to a "sent-mail" mailbox (assuming
>you want to avoid mixing it with received mail to reduce clutter when
>looking at sent messages), then opening "sent-mail" is almost as easy as
>opening Out. Not quite as easy, since Out is cmd-0. But doesn't Mac Eudora
>allow you to assign cmd keys? I thought I remembered this being one way it
>was better than Win Eudora. Thus one cmd-stroke either way.

Yes, that could certainly work.

>Once you filter outgoing messages immediately to sent-mail, you almost
>never open the Out box. The only reasons I open Out are 1) to revise a
>message I just queued but which hasn't been sent yet (I do this too often),
>or 2) to resume writing something I've closed to reduce clutter when I
>wasn't going to work on it for a while. Once you *always* go to sent-mail
>for archival stuff, you just get used to doing that instead of going to the
>Out box, and you avoid using the highly volatile Out for archival storage.

I open the Out box all the time to get to things I've queued but not
yet sent too.

I'm not sure how much more volatile Out would be in comparison to
another mailbox that was receiving all sent mail, though. It wouldn't
have the writes on auto-save, but otherwise would seem fairly similar.

cheers... -Adam

On Apr 11, 2008, at 6:29 PM, Adam C. Engst wrote:
> I open the Out box all the time to get to things I've queued but not
> yet sent too.
>
> I'm not sure how much more volatile Out would be in comparison to
> another mailbox that was receiving all sent mail, though. It wouldn't
> have the writes on auto-save, but otherwise would seem fairly similar.

The absolute need to keep In and Out (and Trash, as I recall) pruned
in Eudora went away with some version released in the 1990s. Prior to
that, Mac Eudora, large In, Out, and Trash led to running out of
memory, which in turn led Eudora to fail in marvelous ways.

The most outrageous failure I know about happened to a friend (the
Seattle Mac dBUG crowd from that period knows him). He was replying
to a mailing list message, and Eudora poured his entire In box into
the reply (somehow carefully removing the message separators). (I was
on the list.) As he worked for a company specializing in Internet
communications at the time, it was perhaps extra embarrassing.)

As to why people cling to Eudora--it works the way many of us work. I
left when IMAP became important to me, since Eudora persisted for too
many versions in the annoying habit of occasionally moving messages
from In to Trash on its own when doing IMAP. Often I spotted the
message vanishing; almost certainly more often I didn't. I still use
Eudora to send a collection of test messages (which are set up to
force the mail to particular machines in our cluster). And I didn't
transfer the old mail to replacement programs, but search in Eudora
when I need to.

Also, when one has used something reasonably comfortably since 1992
(in my case--earlier for some here) it's hard to change.

   --John

At 18:29 04/11/08 -0700, Adam King wrote:
>Any how does any of this relate to corrupt mailboxes? Ya got me.

Only in choosing the safer place for archiving.

>I lost about a month of email 3 years ago when my Entourage DB got corrupted

Yep, that's one reason some of us don't like monolithic DBs for email.

At 18:29 04/11/08 -0700, Adam C. Engst wrote:
>I'm not sure how much more volatile Out would be in comparison to
>another mailbox that was receiving all sent mail, though. It wouldn't
>have the writes on auto-save, but otherwise would seem fairly similar.

Well, the writes on auto-save would be a lot of writes for me, and I
suspect for you too.

But more importantly, I'm pretty sure that Eudora does some dancing with
Out every time you send mail. I don't have specific reasons at hand which
apply to Mac Eudora. (I do have one such indication for Win Eudora, FWIW.)
But Eudora does seem to do some extra work due to Out being not just a
mailbox but also the queue for outgoing email.

Also, your own experience that Out gets corrupted occasionally implies
something other than pure appending. For example, when you open and close
it, does it get compacted to eliminate all those auto-saves? I'd guess
probably so, and compacting is high activity.

Edward
--
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

At 6:29 PM -0700 4/11/08, Adam King wrote:
>Maybe I'm missing most of the issue, since I don't use Eudora and have never
>even seen it but wouldn't filter rules to move sent items to the correct
>folders be a lot easier than sifting through all sent items looking for an
>particular email?

Not the way I work. My mind easily differentiates between that which
I've received and read, and that which I've written, so I have no
trouble figuring out whether to search an archived Out mailbox or
some other mailbox.

Plus, there's no way to filter all my mail to a "correct" mailbox
since I receive a vast amount of mail from strangers that falls into
very general categories, and it would be hard to set up filters that
do anything useful with them. For instance, I don't delete my Trash -
it's basically a big repository of stuff I probably don't want, but
see no reason to delete in case I'm wrong. Disk space is cheap and a
few extra megabytes aren't important. But it would make no sense to
filter a reply to a message into the Trash as well, just because I
didn't think I wanted to file the original.

At 9:40 AM -0700 4/13/08, Edward Reid wrote:
>At 18:29 04/11/08 -0700, Adam C. Engst wrote:
>>I'm not sure how much more volatile Out would be in comparison to
>>another mailbox that was receiving all sent mail, though. It wouldn't
>>have the writes on auto-save, but otherwise would seem fairly similar.
>
>Also, your own experience that Out gets corrupted occasionally implies
>something other than pure appending. For example, when you open and close
>it, does it get compacted to eliminate all those auto-saves? I'd guess
>probably so, and compacting is high activity.

I presume, though do not know, that Eudora compacts Out along the
same rules as other mailboxes (I have it set to 1% of wasted space).
My recent corruption has all happened when specifically writing to
the Out box by saving a message - I actually had it sort of happen
again when I went to reuse the contents of that message, so I suspect
there's something in that particular message that Eudora doesn't like.

To be clear, Eudora has probably suffered corrupted (to the level I
discussed in the article) mailboxes maybe 3 times in 15+ years of
usage. It's just a little more likely with the increased level of
crashing in Leopard, since a crash during a write can be a problem.
Crashes that result in messages being marked as recovered are of
course more frequent, but that's usually just a matter of
Option-clicking the ? icon and changing the status of them all to
unread.

cheers... -Adam

Here's an interesting aside to all this: My boss (a computer neophyte) just can't be bothered with the notion of numerous mailboxes cluttering up his interface, so he insists on filing ALL of his mail in the Trash folder. Spam and unwanted stuff he then doubleclick-deletes. Exasperating at this sounds, I'm paid to go along with him. But being volatile, the trash once got deleted and he was very upset.

Rather than try to train an old dog with new tricks, I cobbled up a simple solution: wrote an applescript to duplicate his "trash" file and set it to execute as a cron file every day. These backups accumulate where he doesn't see them, but if something should happen and the file gets corrupted or deleted, I just copy back the latest backup and rename it appropriately.

And note, this was long before "time machine" came on the scene.

Anyway, I offer it as a possible preventative/curative to corrupt mailboxes (and as interesting cocktail-party chatter).

EAR

At 16:35 04/15/08 -0700, edward224 wrote:
>Rather than try to train an old dog with new tricks, I cobbled up a simple
>solution: wrote an applescript to duplicate his "trash" file and set it to
>execute as a cron file every day.

I have 2/3 of my biological family using Eudora. (My other sister knows she
gets less support from me as a result of her intransigence.) For my mom, I
set up an automatic archive. It's far less sophisticated than my own, as I
don't expect it to be used except in an emergency to recover otherwise lost
email. Everything she receives and sends gets copied to a fixed mailbox
before other filters are applied. That mailbox probably has thousands of
messages now, and I should check it, but I don't think it's going to run
into the 32K limit any time soon.

So I agree, in some cases just planning for emergencies is the best you can
reasonably do.

Edward
--
Art works by Melynda Reid: http://paleo.org

More on mailbox corruptions : Some of my mailboxes have corrupted several times in the past couple of months. Generally the larger and more frequently used ones, though the In box corrupted today with under 100 messages and 500K in it.

Any idea what could do this? (Leopard 10.5.2, Eudora 6.2.4).

Eudora is not putting attachments into the Attachments Folder. So when I open a message with an attachment I get the spinning beachball then blink -- Eudora crashes. I am sure the Attachments Folder is in the Eudora Folder in my personal Documents Folder, but I keep finding attachments in the Parts Folder (which has 579 items in it). Whenever I open Settings, the Attachments Folder is pointing to the Eudora application folder (so I locate the Attachments Folder again). Obviously the settings are not right.

I looked at the Eudora Log and found this:

Sun Jun 15 22:08:18 2008 MAIN 524296:0.10.9 Out primary toc missing MAIN 524296:0.0.0 Out secondary toc missing MAIN 524296:0.0.0 TOCDates(Out): -43

MacBook late 2006, 10.4.8, Eudora 6.2.4.

On 21-Jun-2008, at 16:45, Shawn Harrison wrote:
> Sun Jun 15 22:08:18 2008 MAIN 524296:0.10.9 Out primary toc missing
> MAIN 524296:0.0.0 Out secondary toc missing MAIN 524296:0.0.0
> TOCDates(Out): -43

Rebuild your toc. I'd also recommend using .toc files as it makes it
much easier to force a rebuild (simply delete the file when Eudora is
not running).