Editing/Healing a Corrupt Eudora Mailbox

TidBITS Talk <mailto:tidbits-talktidbits.com> wrote:
> I find that if in bbedit i try to remove mail messages, and then open
> the mailbox in eudora, the dates on the messages in the mailbox will
> change and the status indicators will also change - despite the fact
> that the mail items themselves have the correct dates.
>
> So i've no idea where eudora gets its mail status info from or where
> label information is stored, or what would cause dates to be
> displayed in a wonky way.

Eudora stores mailboxes in two separate data streams: the messages in mbox format, which you edited; and an index ('table of contents' or toc) on those, which also contains label info, read/unread status, whether you replied to them and more. From your description, it sounds like your edits made the toc out of sync with the mbox, but not so badly that eudora itself noticed and tried to repair.

The solution would be to force Eudora to repair the mail folder (=mbox+toc). There might be a command for that, but what surely works is to move the toc to another location when Eudora is not running. On starting the app, it will then ask to rebuild it.

*how* to remove the toc depends. There's some heritage going on here. If you see two files per mailbox, an .mbx and a .toc, then you simply remove the latter. If you only have .mbx, then the toc might be hidden in the resource fork, and you can use your favourite utility to strip that. This is the 'old mac way' though, depreciated in OS X, where packages are used. I don't know if Eudora has moved its mailboxes to this format as well. In that case, right-clicking on the mailbox-file should have an 'show package contents' option in the menu shown; in a subfolder you should find a toc file (or maybe more).

Anyway, removing messages from the mbx by hand might be a bad idea anyway. Try hacking the preference that has the current open mailboxes and remove it from that list (or remove that whole preference alltogether, it's no great loss unless you have a carefully crafter list of hundreds of windows :-) - or force Eudora to rebuild the index for that box, removing the mbx using one of the methods mentioned.

Good luck,
Driek
(still holding on to Eudora, grudgingly, until my provider finally moves their IMAP-server from 'experimental' to 'supported').

On 11/10/06 09:39, "m.c. schraefel" <mcthe-mind.com> wrote:

> Tidbits folks still seem to use eudora (and Adam's book on same),
> hence my rather desperate plea, adam's ok pending, to this group:
>
> do any of you have knowledge or experience in fixing eudora mailboxes
> that will no longer open (in fact will crash) eudora?

Option-click on the 'size' display in bottom left hand corner of the mailbox
listing - the numbers that show how many messages selected/in the mailbox
etc.

--
Barry

Have you checked the newsgroup comp.mail.eudora.mac? I haven't hung out
there in quite a while, but in past years found a number of knowledgeable
people there.

At 01:39 10/11/06 -0700, m.c. schraefel wrote:
>it's almost made me want to pitch eudora

Unfortunately, Qualcomm support is a brick wall apparently intended only to
shield the developers from problem reports, rather than to solve problems.
I still like Eudora but cannot recommend it any more, based on the poor
support.

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

On 11 Oct 2006, at 02:39 , m.c. schraefel wrote:
> So i've no idea where eudora gets its mail status info from or where
> label information is stored, or what would cause dates to be
> displayed in a wonky way.

Eudora used to keep a separate index file. However, depending on
preferences, it could keep that index in the resource fork of the
mbox file.

first, see if the mailbox has a resource folk. I would do this by
opening terminal, typing in 'ls -l', dragging the mailbox to the
terminal window to get the path, and then adding /rsrc to the end.
If the size is not 0, then the index is in the resource fork.

% ls -l /Users/kreme/Documents/Mailboxes/My\ Mail/rsrc
-rw-r--r-- 1 kreme kreme 0 Sep 20 14:56 /Users/kreme/Documents/
Mailboxes/My\ Mail/rsrc

The 0 before the date indicates this file has no resource fork.

Assuming this is the problem, then you want to remove the resource
fork. hit the up arrow in the Terminal, then Control-A which will
put the cursor at the start of the line. Arrow over, backspace, and
replace 'ls -l' with 'rm'.

Do this on a copy of the mailbox file, and you might have to twiddle
with it a little. I can't sem to find a file on my system with a
resource fork to test, so you might need 'rm -r' instead of just rm.

You could also load the file in BBEdit and "save a copy as..." a .txt
file, that should get rid of the resource fork, then simly rename the
file back (using the get info window and not the finder)

If the mailbox doesn't have a resource fork, then find the index file
(should be named the same as the mailbox, but with a .toc extension)
and delete it.

Keep in mind I haven't used Eudora in about 6 1/2 years, so work on
backups and if anyone else tells you something differently, trust
them :)

--
I listen to the wind, to the wind of my soul

On 11.10.2006, at 21:54, Edward Reid wrote:

> Unfortunately, Qualcomm support is a brick wall apparently intended
> only to
> shield the developers from problem reports, rather than to solve
> problems.
> I still like Eudora but cannot recommend it any more, based on the
> poor
> support.

But since it has been announced that Eudora will be open sourced and
joined
with the Mozilla Thunderbird efforts[1], there is hope that the
better aspects
of Eudora will be joined with the modern ones from Thunderbird.

[1] <http://slashdot.org/articles/06/10/11/1456217.shtml>

Cheers Kei

thank you all for your thoughts

Just as a follow up, removing/overwriting the rsrc fork did the best
to heal the majority of the damage - and this was a BIG mailbox, too.

Just for some reference points:

1) - e. mailboxes do not show up as packages, so removing the rsrc
fork requires a terminal or utility approach:

Lewis's suggestion
>
>% ls -l /Users/kreme/Documents/Mailboxes/My\ Mail/rsrc
>-rw-r--r-- 1 kreme kreme 0 Sep 20 14:56 /Users/kreme/Documents/
>Mailboxes/My\ Mail/rsrc
>
>The 0 before the date indicates this file has no resource fork.

Was great for checking the presence and state of the resource fork.

2) - removing the resource fork using "rm" even with sudo just seemed
not to work - kept getting operation denied so used a demo version of
tinkertool system. would like to know how to delete it with the
terminal!

3) once the resource fork was deleted, eudora still crashed trying to
open the mailbox, so in BBEdit, i opened it, made a copy, deleted
half the box in the copy, then was able to open this reduced copy in
the mailbox.

4) the status on the messages showed up as all received mail as
unread; all sent mail as unsent; all labels were lost, but at least
the dates were correct and it correctly distinguished what was sent
and received mail.

Thank you very much all for your help with this.

mc

Over the 10 years or so I've been using Eudora I've noticed reasons that the mail boxes become corrupted. First off, it is always a good idea to have a backup of your Mail Folder, so you can go back to a working version of your various boxes. I don't know what the actual limit is for the number of messages a mail box (external, not in/out), but I found the likelihood of a corrupt folder and crashes seems to occur at numbers over 20,000.



[I believe it's 32,767 (I fill mailboxes every so often with spam or Take Control email receipts), but realistically, I create new mailboxes once I hit 32,000 to avoid the confusion that can result when they fill up. -Adam]



For this reason I recommend creating archive mail folders every year or so. One thing I routinely do is to clear out the empty space in a mail box by clicking on the size status box in the lower left corner of the mail box window. If you don't, then when there is a crash and the box is corrupt, then these deleted or transfered emails will reappear with '?' in the status column. Sometimes it's just a matter of deleting them, sometimes it's a sign that there is more corruption.



[That's good advice. -Adam]



There have been times when the mail box appeared to be fine in the listing, but upon inspecting the mails there were skewed with other mails, so that the original message was usually no longer complete and the body text didn't match the sender. Very disturbing if you don't have a backup of all the old emails.

All this said, I wouldn't give up Eudora for any other client. several things make it stand out: super fast and complex searches, complex filter functions, Templates, multiple personalities.

Hope the open source version improves on these in addition to any 'fluff'

My inbox is hosed. I just found this thread. Twelve years of mail completely corrupted. And yes, about 31000 messages.

My other mailboxes are ok. I have a backup from a month ago that seems fine. So maybe a month of mail lost. Not sure yet. I have to get to work.

I am not happy. Been a loyal supporter of Eudora all these years. Not happy.



[Sorry to hear it! Real (and much more regular than monthly) backups are your friend. Whether it's a bug or some other catastrophe, you can never anticipate when trouble will strike. -Adam]

My backup from yesterday is also corrupt. I am going after work to retrieve my backup from two days ago from my off-premises storage, which I do about twice a month. I normally have backups available spaced a week apart, then a daily one, but I don't have the one from a week ago due to an accident in the film I'm making. Long, boring story, but I have a month ago, a day ago and two days ago.

I'll report back later.

I share your pain, brother, having unsuccessfully tried to resurrect many years of archived Eudora mailfolders when I switched to mac and succeeded only corrupting the files irretreiveably.

After that, though, I ditched Eudora for Mail and haven't looked back since. Eudora mac didn't seem to support or convert the customized plug ins from the Eudora Win I needed, and there was really no significant feature that Mail didn't do equally well or better, plus seamlessly integrate with other OS X staples, particularly Spotlight. Plus it was clear Mac Eudora wasn't being upgraded anymore on Windows schedule...Eudora 7's been out for a while for Windows, but stuck at 6.2.4. for Mac.

One thing that would seem to apply to both programs used as POP3 clients (where old mail is only kept on the client computer, not the server, like IMAP) is to archive mail periodically, say each month, and periodically sweep the inbox clean into an archive each month or two. This prevents your inbox from becoming this huge file that has trouble synching with the server, even with renumbering of active message # headers, and, as you saw, has the potential to corrupt ALL your mail instead of a months' worth.

Lastly, one thing you may want to check with the corrupted files in BBEedit is that you've probably noticed each mailbox in Eudora is represented by two files, an index file (inbox.idx) and a data file (inbox.mbx). I think the pointers of status and some others are kept in the index file. Sometimes you can also force Eudora to reindex a corrupted file by closing the program, deleting the index file and reopening, although IIRC this worked better for the Windows version than the Mac.

Good luck!

Paul,

There is a good chance the email is not "completely corrupted." Have you tried opening the Inbox file with BBEdit or TextWrangler? I'm assuming you are a Mac user. Eudora stores its mail as TEXT files instead of the databases that many other mail clients use. That means that even if you cannot somehow fix the mailbox itself, you can at least read the text file to find information you needed from those emails. There is a good chance you can somehow split that Inbox as well and possibly even repair the "corruption."

On 21-Feb-2007, at 09:14, Paul V wrote:
> My backup from yesterday is also corrupt. I am going after work to
> retrieve my backup from two days ago from my off-premises storage,
> which I do about twice a month. I normally have backups available
> spaced a week apart, then a daily one, but I don't have the one
> from a week ago due to an accident in the film I'm making. Long,
> boring story, but I have a month ago, a day ago and two days ago.

Keep in mind that the Eudora mail file is simply a unix mbox file
with improper line endings. Try opening the file in BBEdit and see
if you can either fix it manually or figure out some grep to fix it.

The other thing you might try, if you have access to a mail server,
is putting the file on the mailserver and seeing how some other
application deals with it. Just be sure and save a copy of the file
with Unix line endings first.

I was able to recover a file of old email just by going in and
searching for "^From " and replacing it with \rFrom ".

of course, it helps if you know what a properly formatted mbox looks
like...