Hi guys,

what happened to me today, may have happened to many other people, but is there solution for it?

my Mail program deleted my 20 MB of emails I had in my yahoo pop3 account after retrieving. Is there any way to copy them back?, I've been looking for a tool without success...I'm a OS X user but I would also use a windows tool if necessary.....

thanks

[email protected]

Empeg II 20 GB

There is no way to push emails back into a POP server via POP.

However, you can get them back there the same way they initially got there, via SMTP (standard emailing). The problem is that most mail tools don't have a way to send an exact copy of an email, only a forwarded copy that has a lot of cruft around the original message. However, the mail tool pine has a command called bounce that will send an exact copy of an email in a mail folder it can see to whatever address you want.

Pine will run on OS X, but I don't know if it can necessarily read the format your mail is in now. What mail tool are you using now?

Assuming you were able to get pine to read those emails, the only problem with bounce would be the potential for the emails to be in a new order and the fact that your regular mail program will probably see the redelivered messages as new messages (and download them again). Some mail headers will change or be added, but they'll mostly be stuff that you'll never really see; the normal ones (From:, To:, Subject:, Date:, etc.) will remain the same.

This is the only even vaguely automated solution I can think of (beyond writing your own tool). If you want to go this way, let me know and I'll give you some more specific instructions.

pine? never heard of it, but if it helps...I'll be really happy to use it. I'm being using Mail with OS X 10.2.2. I must say, Mail, is a bit crappy, not very happy with it, but has very nice features, and is really easy to use. Prefer OE, I'll be installing Entourege shortly, which I guess is much better...where can I get Pine? thanks for your help, I really appreciate it Mario

where can I get Pine?

http://www.washington.edu/pine/

/Michael

I use Mail and like it quite a bit. My only problem is that it sometimes loses track of how many unread messages there are.

I can't imagine why anyone would specifically like OE, but to each his own.

Anyway, pine is a Unix text-based mail client. There may be a binary version available for MacOS X somewhere, or there may not, in which case, you'll have to compile it on your own, which may require installing the developer tools if you've not already done so. ISTR that pine compiles up fairly easily.

I'm not in front of an OSX machine now (obviously), but a quick google turns up the fact that Mail keeps its folders in mbox format, which is a format pine can understand. I can't seem to find exactly where it keeps them, but look in your home directory. It should be fairly obvious, I'd imagine.

Anyway, once you've got pine runnning, you'll have to tell it to look at Mail's folder:

1. Make sure you quit Mail first, then copy the Mail folder file somewhere else (so you don't accidentally modify it), somewhere like /Users/username/mbox.
2. Now start pine in a Terminal window and enter its configuration screens (SC from the initial screen).
3. Then change the inbox path to the full pathname of that Mail folder's file that you just copied (/Users/username/mbox or whatever).
4. Also find the option called enable-aggregate-command-set and enable it.
5. Exit the configuration screen and confirm everything. You might have to exit and restart pine at this point; it'll tell you if you do.
6. Now go into the INBOX (press I from the initial screen).
7. Select all the messages you need to requeue using the ; command. There are some reasonably advanced searches here that might be useful to you, or you could just select each one individually.
8. Once you've selected all the messages (they should be marked with an X at the beginning of the line), press A to issue a command that will affect all of the selected messages, then press B, which will ``bounce'' all of them.
9. It'll ask you to enter an email address to bounce them to; enter your email address whose messages get delivered to the POP server you want them to requeue into. It'll ask you to confirm (do so) and it'll send them all.

The only thing I can think of that might make this not work is if Unix mail sending isn't set up right on MacOS X by default. I don't think that's the case, but if it doesn't work, go back into the config screen and set the smtp-server to whatever you'd normally set it to under Mail or OE or whatever and try again.

MacOS X binary of pine

I haven't checked to see if it works.

[nermal:~] klaruz% fink list pine

Information about 1784 packages read in 2 seconds.



     pine             4.50-1       Text based tool for reading, sending, and...

     pine-ssl         4.50-1       Text based tool for managing emails, with...

     pinepgp          0.17.2-1     Filters which enables pine to use signed/...

[nermal:~] klaruz% 

http://fink.sourceforge.net/

If you use mac os x and unix, you can't beat fink. Especially if you like debian.

hi guys, thanks for the kick-ass explanation, really appreciate it: ok....I'm doing today a loot of things at the same time, my hard drive is making my problems too, so I decided to make a full backup (18 GB) to a External Firewire hard drive. Anyway... as I see the first and main issue is to make pine run on OS X, that will need a bit of investigation in internet. (never played with the Unix site of OS X) Then I'll follow your instructions: yes, I like Mail.app too, but as I said it lacks of important features, but never the less is also my main client. I don't use OE anymore. I'll take a look a google so what I find about pine installation in OS X... come back to you :-)