Hi.

I use thunderbird to access IMAP folders on my linux email box. The old mail is saved as a number of different folders depending on content.

Just now I noticed that one folder seems to be broken in some way, as there are only about half a dozen emails displayed, even though the mailbox file is about 1.5GB in size, and I know for a fact it had several hundred emails in it. Thunderbird knew this as well, as when I opened the folder it showed all the emails for a moment until it scanned the file, then most of them vanished.

I assume they're still there, and in fact if I dump the file to a console I can see the text. The file must be corrupt in some way. Is there any way to scan, and preferably fix, such an occurance?

Patrick

I'm pretty sure it's just an mbox file. Seems to me that there's an mbox repair program somewhere, but I can't find it at the moment.

Possibly, but it works fine for the couple of dozen other folders for the same user.

pca

What happens when you point a different imap reader at the same mailboxes?

Eg. KDE's KMail ?

Cheers

Thunderbird keeps two kinds of files: regular Berkeley mbox-style files, plus some database files to accelerate things. If you go into your Thunderbird directory (on Windows, that would be \Documents and Settings\pca\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\<whatever>.default\ImapMail\your.mail.server.com), you'll see all the 'msf' files. Those are cached from your imap server. The 'sbd' files are subdirectories.

Assuming you trust your data is safely on the imap server, you can safely delete any 'msf' file and Thunderbird will rescan your imap directory.

Now, for your locally stored mail (in the Mail folder rather than the ImapMail folder), you'll see both 'msf' files and files without any suffix. The without-suffix files are your locally stored mail, in Berkeley-mbox format. You can safely delete the 'msf' files and Thunderbird will recreate them.

Warnings: never monkey around with these files when Thunderbird is actually running. Also, when in doubt, make backups before deleting files.

Have a look here.

Maybe some of these ideas will help.