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

[Marco Carmosino]

Do these programs (thunderbird etc) store messages in mbox format? If 
so, piping the mbox files in and out of the "formail" program (part of 
procmail, it forces messages into mbox format using some heuristics) can 
fix at least some, perhaps even most corruption. Then, you can diff the 
formail output and see what messages were dropped and fix those 
manually.

I had to recover a bunch of email archives with corruption a couple 
years ago and this worked well. Formail can also split mboxes into 
uniform-sized files, so you can take on this task in bite-sized chunks, 
so you can do this 100 messages at a time or so.

I lost the scripts that I used to do this but here are some links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procmail
http://linuxcommand.org/man_pages/formail1.html

Formail comes with mac os x.

best,

-- marco


On 14 May 2015, at 9:57, Helen Holzgrafe wrote:

> Following up on my last message:
>
> When I got the endless sync problem when moving a folder, here is the 
> only thing that worked to keep going:
>
> Force  quit Mailmate.
> Restart Mailmate.
> Remove completely the folder in question.
> Quit Mailmate again (this is crucial for some reason).
> Restart Mailmate.
> Try again to move a smaller set of messages from the offending folder.
>
> Perhaps it would be good if Mailmate could do better 
> detecting/handling corrupt import files.  For me, it would have made 
> things easier if Mailmate could report which message(s) seem corrupt . 
> Then I could have imported the good ones with less trial and error. 
> Maybe Mailmate could attempt to fix the corrupt messages and import 
> them into some special folder for further inspection by the user...
>
> -Helen
>
> On 14 May 2015, at 9:35, Helen Holzgrafe wrote:
>
>> 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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