Re: unexpected problem with icedove : hundred of storaged mails no longer have a body !
On Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:48:53 +0100, Bernard wrote:
> Camaleón wrote:
(...)
>> 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. 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.
Sorry to hear that :-(
You can also try to load/import the mbox file with another MUA
(Evolution, for instance) and see how it behaves. This way you could
isolate the problem: corrupted mbox file or any kind of problem coming
from the MUA :-?
> 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.
I just have arrived into Thunderbird/Icedove (was using for the last
years KMail with a maildir structure) and in fact, that Thunderbird
policy of having no option to use "maildir" or "mbox" is quite annoying,
to say something. "Compacting" is very badly managed in Thunderbird (it
is disabled by default, dunno why...) and in fact mbox storage "needs" a
quite constant compacting operation to get a healthy mailbox.
I just have been bitten by this a few days ago: my "inbox" file was 650
MiB size -in just 4 months of use- (but I only had "one" message there)
so after a bit digging¹, I found that "compacting" option was necessary
to delete the messages marked as "deleted" that in Thunderbird are not
deleted at all unless you hit the compact button (or you activate the
auto-compact routine). So the inbox was growing on each e-mail that was
passing through it and so explained the size of the inbox file.
My "~/.mozilla-thunderbird" profile holds up to 5 GiB of e-mails and data
(from 1999 to now), so loosing any of them is not an option for me. I
always make complete backups of my current user profile :-)
Anyway, take a look into the Mozillazine about compacting as it also
points to another links about how to recover corrupted mbox files.
¹ http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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