[NTLUG:Discuss] corrupt mbox file

[cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com]

On Tue, 30 Oct 2001 23:16:08 CST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Travis Bell <tjbell at usa.net>  said:
> On Tue, Oct 30, 2001 at 11:06:09PM -0500, cbbrowne at cbbrowne.com wrote:
> > 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...

> Well, I've been meaning to switch to qmail anyway...perhaps I'll
> change to Maildir format at the same time.  In the mean time, I
> still have a corrupt mbox file.  Perhaps there's a mbox -> Maildir
> converter that will fix it as it changes the format?

There's not enough "format" there to _verify_ for there to be tools to
fix it.

That's a pretty big problem with "mbox;" it's not a highly formalized
format, and if it gets broke, it pretty much takes human examination
to do the "surgery" required to fix it.

Perhaps someone could construct a Perl or Python script that would do
some "educating guessing;" I'm not aware of any such...
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