Thunderbird question

Joe Zeff joe at zeff.us
Sun Jul 5 20:20:45 UTC 2015


On 07/05/2015 01:03 PM, Gordon Messmer wrote:
> On 07/05/2015 12:55 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
>> Yes and no.  If you make a backup copy of your data just before trying
>> to recover and the recovery process messes up, you can always try again.
>
> That really only matters if the index is damaged, and not the data file.
>   If the mbox data file is damaged, recovery won't do you any good.

Sometimes there are ways to fix the problem by editing the mbox itself. 
  If memory serves, the file can become unreadable if there's garbage in 
front of the beginning of the first message.  (This used to be a problem 
when I did tech support for an ISP; a customer couldn't download their 
email because of this.  After it became clear that this was the issue, 
somebody wrote a script to clean that out, but we had to send a request 
to the NOC to have it done.)  I don't know what the recovery process 
does, or if it can handle this type of thing, but it's always best if 
you have a way to back out of a "fix" that didn't.


More information about the users mailing list