Do these programs (thunderbird etc) store messages in mbox format? If
so, piping the mbox files in and out of the "formail" program (part of
procmail, it forces messages into mbox format using some heuristics) can
fix at least some, perhaps even most corruption. Then, you can diff the
formail output and see what messages were dropped and fix those
manually.
I had to recover a bunch of email archives with corruption a couple
years ago and this worked well. Formail can also split mboxes into
uniform-sized files, so you can take on this task in bite-sized chunks,
so you can do this 100 messages at a time or so.
I lost the scripts that I used to do this but here are some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail
http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/formail1.html
Formail comes with mac os x.
best,
-- marco
On 14 May 2015, at 9:57, Helen Holzgrafe wrote:
Following up on my last message:
When I got the endless sync problem when moving a folder, here is the
only thing that worked to keep going:
Force quit Mailmate.
Restart Mailmate.
Remove completely the folder in question.
Quit Mailmate again (this is crucial for some reason).
Restart Mailmate.
Try again to move a smaller set of messages from the offending folder.
Perhaps it would be good if Mailmate could do better
detecting/handling corrupt import files. For me, it would have made
things easier if Mailmate could report which message(s) seem corrupt .
Then I could have imported the good ones with less trial and error.
Maybe Mailmate could attempt to fix the corrupt messages and import
them into some special folder for further inspection by the user...
-Helen
On 14 May 2015, at 9:35, Helen Holzgrafe wrote:
I just saw this thread and I have had the same problem with endless
synchronizing while transitioning. I was using Postbox, but it is
very similar to Thunderbird (I believe from the same base source
code). I had 20+ years of mail, more than 350,000 messages and three
accounts.
I solved this by never moving more than one mailbox folder at a time
(not account, not mail box, but folder). If a folder was more than
about a 1000 messages I broke that up even smaller. That allowed me
to get everything moved over.
What was the problem for me and why I never reported anything to
Benny:
Every time I had a folder fail to transition properly was because it
had one or more corrupt mail messages in the folder. Every time the
synchronize would fail I would reduce the number of messages being
moved until I was able to find the corrupt message(s).
Those I could not move until I manually edited the message using
BBedit to correct the issue. It was usually a corrupt line in the
header or a missing end of message line. Thunderbird and Postbox
keep message folders as very big files and use special lines in the
files to indicate where messages begin and end. If even one byte of
one of these lines is wrong the whole thing goes wrong very quickly.
I usually found these in very old mail files that weren't used much
and had been moved from disk to disk or service to service and had
just degraded over time.
I switched to Mailmate because I was having trouble with Postbox not
handling my messages very well any more (probably because of these
corrupt messages, but I cannot be sure). I had intended to move stuff
into Mailmate to clean up my mail archive and then move back to
Postbox. However, I found Mailmate a better client.
I also must point out that Benny was very helpful and responsive to
my questions and helped with some other issues I had transitioning.
The developer of Postbox never responded to my requests for help with
my mail problems, so I had to learn all this myself. Is Thunderbird
even actively supported anymore?
-Helen
On 14 May 2015, at 9:07, James Galvin wrote:
On 5/14/15 7:35 AM, Annamarie wrote:
How difficult would it be to simply start using MM fresh? Leave all
those messages in the apps where they are now? Go reference them
when
you need them - I realize that building an address list might take
a bit
of time but maybe cumulatively not as much time as you've already
spent
trying to get this to work?
I've been shocked by how little I actually go back to old emails.
My experience is the opposite. For my day job, email addressed to
me is quite valuable and necessarily retained, for a variety of
reasons I won't detail here. Ready access is essential.
By the way, I have email going back at least 25 years, that is not
included in this MailMate transition. It's only accessible on old
desktops and laptops that I keep around just to have access to the
archives. Interestingly, MailMate presents an opportunity for me to
bring forward some of these archives, which would be a big win for
me. However, I'll have to be wary of reaching a size limit as
discussed elsewhere in this thread.
And some of that old email has proved quite valuable.
Jim
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