[SteveJobs]

Hi everyone,
although there's so much buzz about the whole Intel stuff about, I have a very different question: I have a .mbox file which seems to be corrupt. It's about 2 GB in size and very important for my work. Here and then, I had problems opening new emails (Mail.app saying that the connection to the server failed and the actual content could not be displayed; however, the headers were displayed correctly and after restarting Mail.app, the mails were displayed correctly). These problems have now enlarged to being unable to open up any email, no matter if old or new. It always gives this message that the connection to the server failed and that the content cannot be displayed. Interestingly, any other "mailbox" works fine - i.e. the junk box, the sent box, the drafts box or simply a new mailbox which I can create.

Note: The computer uses OS X 10.3.9

I have tried several things.
1. I kicked out the "Mail" folder from my personal Library, same for the mail.app preferences and the "Mail" folder in "Caches" in my personal Library. I then restarted Mail.app and typed in all my email account data - and Mail.app downloaded my mails flawlessly, being able to open up everything without any problem. Sadly, this is a POP server and concerned were only about 30 emails lying on the server. I am considering an IMAP account to circumvent similar problems in the future, but this is not the issue now.
2. I tried to copy the emails to my PowerBook which uses OS X 10.4.1, but it does not work there either. I simply cannot import them because it says "no mails" - it does not recognize them, I guess it is like this because they are corrupt.
3. I tried opening them in TextEdit. Took a few minutes. Looked weird - correct information at the beginning, then - after three pages or so - only numbers and letters all mixed up for dozens of pages.
4. I tried to import them into Entourage, but Entourage only opens the preinstalled mails and cannot import mails from external folders. I could move the emails to the internal folder, but I haven't tried yet. I'm trying this while writing this note.
5. I have thought about using some CLI program which can open .mbox files - are there any? Perhaps it might help to open it and export it into some text file which, in turn, Mail.app or Entourage can open.

It's really important, my emails are my life, they also include many important email addresses that I have not copied into the AddressBook because this only includes the most important addresses and not secondaries or so...

H E L P ?? !!


Any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Steve

[yukon]

I've had the same thing. The first thing to do is try importing into other programs like Mozilla Mail, I see you've already tried Entourage. Next, there's also the option of converting it to maildir and trying to sort it out that way, if the mbox is badly corrupted then the conversion may not go well. The real option is to get a better text editor than textedit (nano, vim, emacs, if you do CLI. BBEdit if you don't, it's what I use so I know of few others), and clip out all that garbage stuff, I'm afraid it's probably overwritten some of your emails....it could be encoded attachments though, watch out for a line above it that says this. Once you have it cleaned up, try importing. It doesn't take long to understand mbox headers, you can manipulate them in your mbox file after a short time. Anyway, once you have it sorted out, organize by file size and then clear out the big emails, save the attachments to disk and remove them from the email/mbox, 2gb is a startlingly large mbox file which would be prone to corruption.

I've seen corrupted mbox files a number of times, it's always a pain in the ass and many people will either tell you "sorry, they're gone" or "you don't really want your emails anyway"....it's usually not so much a problem of the emails being gone, it's getting the emails in a format that can be understood without problems by your mail client. Maildir is great, but DJB scares me ;-), the conversion scripts (mbox2maildir and maildir2mbox) are available at qmail.org and that's useful if you find it helpful to have the mails in seperate files in order to undo the corruption. Best of luck, I'll try and follow your thread but it might get drowned in the Intel crap.

[SteveJobs]

Thanks for the helpful comments and remarks, gave a more secure feeling on the whole thing already. Actually, the import into Entourage works, so all emails are accessable - which is huge

The question is if the export from entourage and import into mail works flawlessly or if it could be troublesome. We'll see.

Steve

[C.J. Moof]

I've repaired these with Mailsmith by Barebones. Import .mbox, divide it into smaller boxes, and export the new .mbox files for Mail.app. They offer a 30 day demo that's not restricted at all.

This is all about the size of the .mbox- I've seen 800megs to 1 gig be the dangerous size- I'm surprised that you made it to 2 gigs.

I would think that Tiger would fix this if you imported there, as it no longer uses the One .mbox to Rule Them All concept, but puts each message as a separate file. Thankfully, as this size corruption issue will be solved, and incremental backups will no longer move over the entire .mbox file, even though it may have one new message since the last backup.....