[all2ofme]

Hi all,

Have had a solid google but not turned up anything of note so far.

I've got a few emails in Mail (and also server-side in Gmail through IMAP) that have empty From or To fields.

I'd like to be able to populate these empty fields but can't work out how. I've tried adding this sort of info to the emlx files in question but my changes aren't recognised in Mail.

Anyone have any tips on how I might do this?

With crossed fingers,
Ben

[JKT]

Not sure if this will work, but drag them to the Drafts folder and you should be able to edit them to your hearts content, including the various fields you are needing.

[all2ofme]

That sounded like a great idea to start with (talk about lateral thinking!), but mulling it over has me thinking that'd rodger my date stamps.

[all2ofme]

Any other ideas? I'm surprised how difficult it is to find info on this - surely it's just some form of text file (it opens as one!).

Is rebuilding the mailbox after some manual editing something to try or is that a risky business? All of my mailboxes bar two are IMAP, if that makes a difference.

[all2ofme]

Here's a follow-up in case someone else needs this one day:

Editing the emlx files in vi worked fine (though the file format is a funny one - perhaps most of the underlying format is something else - MIME, p'raps? - it took me a while to work out some issues), but I needed to re-import them all in order to have the changes recognised.

Notes from along the way:
- Character encoding problems (å£æö etc.) in vi didn't affect the end result.
- The first characters of the file (numeric) seem to denote the number of characters after which no further text will be displayed. So 884 means that only the next 884 characters will be displayed by Mail (or Quicklook). This appears to be so that the XML from the end of the file isn't shown at the front end, but surely there'd have been a cleverer way of doing that. Anyway...
- The order of the From, To and Subject fields in the header can mean that Mail won't display values against them.

For example, I'd received emails where Subject was last (after all sorts of X-Mailer, Originating-IP etc. gumpf), and this meant that Mail never displayed it. It worked fine in Quicklook, however. Swapping the order fixed it.

- Finally, some emails didn't take any of their From, To and Subject fields with them when transferring to Gmail (via IMAP). They'd appear fine on a local mailbox, though. In the end this appeared to come down to there being an indented, additional date stamp immediately after the character count truncating thang mentioned above. For example:

2633

Sat, 19 Aug 2000 GMT

Once I'd removed that it was fine in both places.

Take all this with a big grain of salt if you need to do something similar yourself (and BACK UP!) - but I'm hoping it might help someone else in a similar situation one day.