Re: unexpected problem with icedove : hundred of storaged mails no longer have a body !
On 2010-03-04 15:48, Bernard wrote:
Camaleón wrote:
Check out the Mozillazine article about this:
***
Disappearing mail
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail
***
Maybe your mbox is corrupted... have you ever perfomed a "compact"
operation?
No, I never have. I read the interresting article on Mozillazine.org,
and I have understood that my mbox got corrupted because of too many
mails in the Inbox folder, with no compacting.
Unless you configured IW in some weird way, shouldn't it auto-
compact when you close IW?
Following the given
advice, I did another trial. It was matter of copying the whole of the
Inbox folder to a newly created folder. But this did not work either :
only those messages in the Inbox folder that had bodies available, got
copied. I tried to copy 2700 or so messages, and in the end only 60 got
copied, all of those with bodies + 3 or 4 messages without bodies. I
still attempted to compact the new folder, but I got nothing more. So,
my fear is that I have lost all my inbox except the more recent
messages, that is, from february 14th on. I am on the Internet ever
since 1994, and I had never lost any mail so far, having used "Forte
Agent" under MSWIN 3.1, then "StarOfficeMail" on RedHat Linux, then
"Thunderbird"... I could recuperate very old mail from backups that I
made in the old days, that would work up to august 2009. Then, from
August 2009 to February 14th 2010, I have lost everything that was in my
Inbox (fortunately a few messages had been moved to other folders)
Thanks to Everyone for your help.
If the messages really are there in the mbox file, save that file
somewhere else before doing anything!
Shut down IW and look at the file with "view" or "less". See if the
messages really are there.
I'd also recommend a local maildir-aware IMAP server. Each message
is in a separate file, so a corrupt message only corrupts itself.
Being Debian, it's easy to set up. You'll just need to use a
utility (should come with most IMAP server packages) to create a
special ~/Maildir.
There's even a Perl script mb2md floating around the tubes to
convert mbox files to Maildir folders.
I like courier-imap, but others like dovecot.
--
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
"If God had wanted man to play soccer, he wouldn't have given
us arms." Mike Ditka
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