AIEEE! The squid no longer responds to the mind control!

[seawasp]

Last night my Netscape hung and crashed and I had to force-quit it.

And now my Email's gone. It appears the Inbox is corrupt; I've managed to import most of the other mailboxes into MacMail, but trying to get Inbox crashes MacMail. Rebooting Netscape -- it doesn't acknowledge it HAS the account at all.

So I guess I have to go and try to edit the Inbox file and see if I can find the part of it (hopefully the header) that's killing everything, or else I've lost about 1.2GB of mail from 5 years through yesterday. :(

Comments

[dsrtao]

The mbox format is standard, and on a UNIX machine, I would run it through this:

formail -e -d -s inboxfile >> newinboxfile

which would dissect the old one message by message and put the good ones into newinboxfile.

You might lose something corrupt, but only that message.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Thunderbird (aka the dissected-out mail component of Netscape) uses mbox files -- but also index files ending in .idx. Factoid I learned the hard way: delete the .idx files and TBird will rebuild them for you. Don't delete the mbox files (no .idx suffix) or you will never see the mail again.

That's assuming you've stored your account locally. If it's stashed on an IMAP server, then all you've lost is your Netscape account settings; create new account and you'll get the mail back.

[seawasp]

Well, I just tried that. I wonder how long it will take to run.

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

Dude. Backups.

Not just backups you should have had, but backups starting RIGHT NOW with the corrupted file so that you can start over if you damage it further.