Huge mailbox split?
in [Shell]
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From: Chris Nehren on 16 Jun 2010 13:08 On 2010-06-16, Ben Bacarisse scribbled these curious markings: > Tuxedo <tuxedo(a)mailinator.com> writes: > >> John Kelly wrote: >> >> [...] >> >>> It is. You could read the Mozilla source and try to hack out your own >>> solution. But as for shell related solutions, I think we have reached >>> the point of diminishing returns. >> >> Yes, I agree, it's now off-topic here. I will search for relevant Mozilla >> groups/forums/docs. > > Just in case you missed the suggestion a while back... have you tried > the file command? It may be able to tell you the format if it is some > standard compressed file. It's very likely not, as jwz is too pleased to rant^Wtell you: http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html (or at least it wasn't a standard format in the iterations he discusses there) Though perhaps searching the Mozilla community sites will yield an extension or addon that can massage the data into something resembling a sane (inasmuch as email can be sane) format. -- Thanks and best regards, Chris Nehren Unless noted, all content I post is CC-BY-SA.
From: Tuxedo on 16 Jun 2010 14:17 Chris Nehren wrote: [...] > It's very likely not, as jwz is too pleased to rant^Wtell you: > http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailsum.html (or at least it wasn't a standard > format in the iterations he discusses there) > > Though perhaps searching the Mozilla community sites will yield an > extension or addon that can massage the data into something resembling a > sane (inasmuch as email can be sane) format. Thanks for the jwz link. I searched a couple of Mozilla related forums but for some reason links from for example: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Thunderbird_:_Tips_:_Compacting_Folders to: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Compacting_folders#Compacting_does_not_seem_to_work do not load. I think I'll put this whole affair down to bad software design by Mozilla developers for not clearly communicating the growing mailbox risk to end-users as part of the actual user interface, combined with user-error of the person having lost years of data that is now probably irretrievable on anything less than a small super-computer and/or by custom programming solutions. That said, I've learned some interesting stuff in this thread :-) Tuxedo
From: Ben Bacarisse on 16 Jun 2010 14:29 Tuxedo <tuxedo(a)mailinator.com> writes: <snip> > I didn't miss it, there always seems to exist a new and interesting command > to try. Unfortunately the output is a bit vague on this particular file: > > $ file MyBigCrapBox > MyBigCrapBox: data OK, that just means file does not know this format. It was worth a try. <snip> -- Ben.
From: Christian Brabandt on 16 Jun 2010 15:54 On 2010-06-15, Tuxedo <tuxedo(a)mailinator.com> wrote: > I thereafter tested to copy 100 bytes of the beginning of the huge file: > dd count=1 bs=100 if=myBigCrapBox of=myBigCrapBox.1 > > But thereby I realise there must be something wrong with the huge mbox > file. The resulting file, myBigCrapBox.1, should be the first 100 bytes > ASCII but it all appears to be binary data, or nothing at all; one editor > (Nedit) just shows the file with a long line of <nul><nul><nul>, while the > filesize is exactly 100 bytes. Could it be, by any chance, that the file was opened for writing by mozilla and the system crashed. So that all opened files that have not been flushed to disk have been nullified? In any case, it look at the other end of the file and check whether there is somewhere a valid mail file. You could also try mutt -f big_brocken_file as well to see if mutt can read it. In my experience, mutt's mbox parser works quite well and I have been able to restore broken mbox files using mutt (that contained junk in between, because it was a original deleted file). Any way, to come back to your original question, to split a huge mbox file, I'd try archivemail. regards, Christian
From: Tuxedo on 16 Jun 2010 16:40
Christian Brabandt wrote: [...] > Could it be, by any chance, that the file was opened for writing by > mozilla and the system crashed. So that all opened files that have not > been flushed to disk have been nullified? That may very well be the case as the system probably crashed with the mail application open. But I don't know for sure what happened and the user probably doesn't either. > In any case, it look at the other end of the file and check whether > there is somewhere a valid mail file. You could also try mutt -f > big_brocken_file as well to see if mutt can read it. In my experience, > mutt's mbox parser works quite well and I have been able to restore > broken mbox files using mutt (that contained junk in between, because it > was a original deleted file). $ mutt -f MyBigCrapBox MyBigCrapBox: Value too large for defined data type (errno = 75) > Any way, to come back to your original question, to split a huge mbox > file, I'd try archivemail. I don't have archivemail on my system but maybe I'll give it a try, although dd appars to be the ideal solution for dealing with extra large files. Thanks, Tuxedo |