I'm just back on my email after being offline for 10 days. I've had to fix my email DB after hitting the 2GB limit, rebuilding the DB and for some idiotic reason tossing the old DB before I realized only a few hundred of the about 200 000 messages were visible. The type of thing you do when you've done something a hundred times and it worked, though it usually pays to be rigid with your data.
Anyway, sitting there with a 1GB rebuilt data file showing a very small number of messages I realized they most likely were in there. So I turned to PowerMail Salvage <http://www.zygoat.ca/products/pmsalvage/> and ran it as a demo for a few hours and nothing turned up. Then I went to bed. When I woke up PMS was up in the ten of thousands of recoverable messages. Yay! With my freshest backup being one and a half month old I decided it was worth to shell out the $52 to get my messages back. After all it was my fault my backup wasn't fresher. So I paid, with Paypal as I had some money already there. As a side-note, does anyone understand why one would use Paypal *with a credit card* instead of just paying with the credit card? Only reason I did was because I had some money there already, but normally I don't see the attraction of using paypal as the payment service, with less than you can make payments with just your account and fill it up any way you choose. It's good for receiving money though. So I got my serial and I went looking for how to add it to the still running PMS. While possible, you have to restart the application and loose all your found messages. Duh'! So entered the serial and restarted PMS and let it run for 24+ hours. It found most likely all my circa 200 000 messages. There was no way to clearly see what order they were in, so I assumed they were in DB key order and more or less in received by date order. I proceeded to make some test exports, started a new DB to import them to and it looked like my assumptions were right. I did some more samples to verify even more and went back to a month behind my latest backup and exported a big chunk of 3 months messages. Then I got my backup online, imported the 3 months of messages and everything looked hunky dory until I did something and PM froze and subsequently refused to properly open the DB behind the spinning wheel. To my surprise getting to back to my backup again gave the same result and it took a while to realize the 7 MB Address database was causing the trouble. No DB would start with it in the PowerMail Files folder. When I finaly succeeded with a new one PM found it to be empty. Hmmm. OK, so ditched and synched with Address Book that would have got all my addresses back if PM actually used that for its addressbook when told to. As you all probably know it just kind of does that. But it was mostly the edits (that ended up in the PowerMail native addressbook) and I'm going trough it all soon anyway. So now I had a working address book with "work" next to the email address. Nice touch Apple. Or should I blame CTM for not putting the "email" label to email addresses when synching to Address Book? My Apple Address Book was once filled from PowerMail. OK, so what now? Well, the search index was of course not completely in touch with the data so tossed that and built from scratch. Took a couple of hours. Now, I realized some thousands of messages was duplicates and I found that PowerMail Salvage *puts headers in the recovered messages(!)*. Bad developer!!! So now I have to fix my DeleteDups script for that. So was it worth the $52 and my time to get the data back? Yes! But Apple, CTM and Zygoat should shape up a bit. PM 5.2.3 Swedish | OS X 10.3.9 | Powerbook G4/400Mhz | 1GB RAM | 30GB HD
