corrupted mail folder. too big or too holey

[Steve Cobrin]

One of my mail folders got a bit too big ( approx 14k messages!), I 
wanted to try and slit it up, but now Mozilla 0.9.2  running under Linux 
refuses to open it. I also have noticed that its a sparse/holey file. I 
want to recover what I can from this mail folder. Does anybody have any 
suggestions?

output from ls -ls command:
40993 -rw------- 1 steve users  4294967295 Jul 01:34 linux-e

   -- Steve