Mail Issues #2...

[seawasp]

Well, I switched from Netrape Aggravator to the Mac Mail program for the interim.

So far, I can't get any of the obvious applications to open (a copy of) the original mail file. Word of course doesn't recognize it, TextEdit refuses it, and when I tried:

"formail -e -d -s inboxfile >> newinboxfile"

(substituting "Inbox" for "inboxfile" and "NewInbox" for "newinboxfile")

my console just sorta sat there for, well, a long time until I finally killed it off. There was a new file called "NewInbox", but it had nothing in it.

Any more ideas? I've got like 1.2GB of mail file sitting there mocking me. I'm sure MOST of it must be perfectly fine.

Comments

[seawasp]

If I could actually **SEE** the file (i.e., get it into a text editor) I'm pretty sure I could fix it -- or verify that it was completely screwed.

Alas, none of my text editors want to read it. Which seems utterly bizarre to me; I mean, even if it was a completely random string of bits, if I tell a plain-text editor to look at it, shouldn't those random bits unparse, as ASCII, into a jumble of text?

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Not if it isn't ASCII. That's the rub. Most text editors can't deal with non-text data, and how they deal with it varies. Anyway, there's always Emacs. It will read just about anything. Size might be a problem but content isn't. For a quick check with Emacs, "cat Inbox | head -1000 > tempfile" and then "emacs tempfile". (And for the record, I hate Lj's auto-formatting. It eats > and <.)

[seawasp]

Hmm. I had thought that if I just took 8-bit strings of 1 and 0, I'd *HAVE* ASCII, even if it wasn't MEANT to be ascii.

Typed in that line; after a while, it came back to the prompt, I typed "emacs tempfile", and it comes up "maximum buffer size exceeded."

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

ASCII is 7-bit, codes 0-127.

That error confirms something: line ends are messed up. So do this instead: "dd if=Inbox of=tempfile bs=1024 count=1024". That will give you an exactly 1MB tempfile. Edit that with Emacs. That will work even if the file is totally mangled. It may not be pretty but it will work.

[kpreid.livejournal.com]

You misunderstand:
Open the file with 'less' as you did before. Make your terminal window reasonably large. Select and copy from your terminal and show us the result.

[seawasp]

No, I don't misunderstand; I made a post showing that stuff.