[MlMt] giving up - MailMate crash - won't synchronize

[Helen Holzgrafe]

I just saw this thread and I have had the same problem with endless 
synchronizing while  transitioning.  I was using Postbox, but it is very 
similar to Thunderbird (I believe from the same base source code). I had 
20+ years of mail, more than 350,000 messages and three accounts.

I solved this by never moving more than one mailbox folder at a time 
(not account, not mail box, but folder). If a folder was more than about 
a 1000 messages I broke that up even smaller. That allowed me to get 
everything moved over.

What was the problem for me and why I never reported anything to Benny:

Every time I had a folder fail to transition properly was because it had 
one or more corrupt mail messages in the folder.  Every time the 
synchronize would fail I would reduce the number of messages being moved 
until I was able to find the corrupt message(s).

Those I could not move until I manually edited the message using BBedit 
to correct the issue.  It was usually a corrupt line in the header or a 
missing end of message line.  Thunderbird and Postbox keep message 
folders as very  big files and use special lines in the files to 
indicate where messages begin and end.  If even one byte of one of these 
lines is wrong the whole thing goes wrong very quickly.

I usually found these in very old mail files that weren't used much and 
had been moved from disk to disk or service to service and had just 
degraded over time.

I switched to Mailmate because I was having trouble with Postbox not 
handling my messages very well any more (probably because of these 
corrupt messages, but I cannot be sure). I had intended to move stuff 
into Mailmate to clean up my mail archive and then move back to Postbox. 
However, I found Mailmate a better client.

I also must point out that Benny was very helpful and responsive to my 
questions and helped with some other issues I had transitioning. The 
developer of Postbox never responded to my requests for help with my 
mail problems, so I had to learn all this myself.  Is Thunderbird even 
actively supported anymore?

-Helen

On 14 May 2015, at 9:07, James Galvin wrote:

> On 5/14/15 7:35 AM, Annamarie wrote:
>> How difficult would it be to simply start using MM fresh? Leave all
>> those messages in the apps where they are now? Go reference them when
>> you need them - I realize that building an address list might take a 
>> bit
>> of time but maybe cumulatively not as much time as you've already 
>> spent
>> trying to get this to work?
>>
>> I've been shocked by how little I actually go back to old emails.
>
> My experience is the opposite.  For my day job, email addressed to me 
> is quite valuable and necessarily retained, for a variety of reasons I 
> won't detail here.  Ready access is essential.
>
> By the way, I have email going back at least 25 years, that is not 
> included in this MailMate transition.  It's only accessible on old 
> desktops and laptops that I keep around just to have access to the 
> archives.  Interestingly, MailMate presents an opportunity for me to 
> bring forward some of these archives, which would be a big win for me. 
> However, I'll have to be wary of reaching a size limit as discussed 
> elsewhere in this thread.
>
> And some of that old email has proved quite valuable.
>
> Jim
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