Camaleón wrote:
I have tried to load the 'Inbox' mbox file using "mutt -f" and, as previously stated, it showed only those messages for which bodies were available, that is, in my case, messages not older than Feb 14th 2010. That included, of course, all of the messages that had been trashed or junked since then, but not physically deleted since no "compacting" had been done. In short, I did not find any useful message to recuperate.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 recentmessages, 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.
It seems that any message older than feb 14th has physically disappeared in the mbox file, and that the only tracks that remained of those are stored in the .msf file (subject lines and other headers). According to what I have read in the Mozillazine doc, it seems weird that only parts of that file got permanently deleted, especially on such criteria as that of date. But the fact is that editing this 'Inbox' mbox file with 'vi' (vim) did not show any more than what I got in using 'mutt -f', that is, it did not show any of the messages older than Feb 14th.
I have read the Mozillazine file about undeleting messages in changing their X-Mozilla-Status to '0000', but I have not found any message to undelete. So the question remains as to know where have such a number of disappeared message bodies gone ?
I had other surprises while testing my mail folders. My "Junk" folder was HUGE, even though it only displayed 3 messages, the others having been moved to Trash on a daily basis or so. Hum... By the way... No, I did not really MOVE them to the Trash folder, which indeed is what I should have done. Instead, I just DELETED them every day, Even though those messages appeared in the Trash folder after the so called 'delete' process, I realize that it must not have done the same job as if I had really 'moved' them. So I can now understand why my uncompacted 'Junk' folder got so huge. Its size was 1,193,268,469 bytes, such as about 1 gb, that is, 30 times larger than the Inbox file ! I then compacted it, and was surprised to find that the process took only about 2 seconds... However the compacting process must have really worked, since, after that, my Junk file only showed 29261 bytes.
I once suspected that the message bodies that had disappeared from my Inbox mbox file, might have gone to Junk or to Trash, so I edited those files with Mutt and also with 'vi'. But No. vi allowed me to search for senders, and, indeed, I did find two messages from the seeked sender... but there must have been about 50, so I believe that those 2 found messages might have been junked by mistake. No more success with the 'Trash' folder. By the way, the 'Junk' folder, when opened with 'mutt -f', displayed 111,822 messages ! True enough, I receive an awful lot of junk mail (maybe 150 a day or so)
There is another file that puzzled me. Up to now, I only mentioned mbox files in
~/.mozilla-thunderbird/j1ay1d2c.default/Mail/Local Folders/ Other files are in : ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/j1ay1d2c.default/Mail/mail.teaser.fr ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/j1ay1d2c.default/Mail/mail.free.fr and two more user accountsIn each of those four directories, I have an 'Inbox' file and a 'Inbox.msf' file. Those 'Inbox.msf files show various sizes, but the 'Inbox' files have 0 bytes... except that on /mail.teaser.fr... even though I receive mail from all four accounts. Being curious, I deleted the /mail.teaser.fr/Inbox file to see what it would do : so far I found no difference in Icedove behaviour with or without that file. It was dated back to... I can't remember, but it was in 2009 or 2008, not recently anyway. That 'Inbox' file was 1,988,796,007 bytes long, that is about 2 gb. I once wondered if my disappeared mail could be inside, and tried editing it. 'mutt -f' replied : "This is not a mailbox file, can't open it". 'vi' refused to say anything : after two hours it was still working ; I had to quit with CTRL-C. I then attempted to split the file into ten pieces, using "split". It then took about 2 minutes to open each piece, that were only 200 mb large, rather small for 'vi'. I could find that the files had only ONE line with 100,000,000 characters. Of course I could not browse it all, but I made a few checks in the ends and in the middle, and I never found anything else than 'arobase' and 'escape' chars
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
I think I've read it all...