[NTLUG:Discuss] corrupt mbox file

Tue Oct 30 22:06:09 CST 2001

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001 20:44:18 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Travis Bell <tjbell at usa.net>  said:
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 09:33:32PM -0500, R P Herrold wrote:
> > On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Travis Bell wrote:
> > 
> > > Does anyone know of a program out there that can repair a
> > > corrupt mbox file?  A search on google turned up nothing.
> > > I was quite surprised.
> > 
> > 
> > .... your favorite test editor will do just fine.  Usually it
> > is just the first message which is corrupt -- There was an
> > exploit against older UW pop servers which used this.
> > 
> > Remember to fully stop sendmail, so it does not try to append
> > to a file while you are in edit.
> > 
> > -- Russ

> Actually, it's not my mailbox file, but rather my sent-mail file
> that Mutt stores my sent emails in.  And it's not the first message
> because when I enter th e 'folder' (really just a file in mbox
> format), I can see all of the emails I'v e sent except for the
> next-to-last one.  When I "tail -n100 sent-mail" I can see the
> message in there, though -- so it's there, but there's just
> something wro ng with it.  I'm playing with it to see what part of
> it is messed up, but I'd l ike it very much if there's a utility
> which does it for me.  ;-)

Something funny's up with your client, too; your messages are
definitely not conforming to the "try to keep width to < 75 cols" that
is typical; the text you enter winds up getting broken arbitrarily at
some number of columns, often in the middle of words...

All of the above represents a pretty good argument against the use of
the "mbox" format for anything of any importance.  It's challenging
enough to keep things well behaved with Sendmail when it tries to lock
/var/spool/mbox/$LOGNAME, but trying to do this with arbitrary home
directories where something like procmail could be throwing in
messages concurrently with reading mail is just asking for trouble.

Using either MH or Maildir "formats" is a whole lot safer...
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