Subject: Troubles with Tenex format

From: Vladimir Solnicky Vladimír Solnický <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 16:22:22 +0100 (MET)

A few weeks ago I switched to Tenex format for inbox and work-on folders. 
Fortunately only for these two. I met the two following problems:

1) Message shrank massages--very often and in situations when neither CR
nor NULL characters were present. These messages were fine in Berkeley
format folders: One example -- I cannot saved to a Tenex folder, I could
to a Berkeley one (from Berkeley). I copied the source folder, piped it
through `tr -d '\015' | tr -d '\000' ' command--the size didn't
changed!--and then there was the same situation. 

2) My mail.txt got unopenable by pine -- there is some error inside. I
think some pointer points to a line which doesn't contein a valid pointer.
Error message is `Cannot parse ...'. This mail.txt folder has about 1.5 MB
and I need to use messages that it contains. Is there any utility which
could help me to recover the folder? Or convert it back to Berkeley
format--this would be much better! 

  In my opinion Tenex format is a good thing but its support in pine 3.91
has some bugs. thanks for any help or advice. V. S. 

|  |  Bc. Vladimir Solnicky (Vladimír Solnický using ISO 8859-1 or 2)
|  |  Institute of Information             UTIA AV CR
 \/   Theory and Automation                Pod vodarenskou vezi 4
Department of Computing Systems            182 08 Praha 8-Liben
+42 2 6605/2212   fax: +42 2 66414677      Czech Republic
+42 2 6605/2364   e-mail: [email-masked]   ftp.utia.cas.cz
http://www.utia.cas.cz/user_data/vs/vs-home.html

---

From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 16:30:23 -0800 (PST)

On Tue, 31 Oct 1995 16:22:22 +0100 (MET), Vladimir Solnicky =?ISO-8859-
2?Q?Vladim=EDr_Solnick=FD?= wrote:
> nor NULL characters were present.

> These messages were fine in Berkeley

You can not save to a different type folder.  In other words, you can save
from Berkeley to Berkeley, or Tenex to Tenex, but you can't save from Berkeley
to Tenex.  This is a restriction at the present time.

Also, "tr -d '\000'" doesn't do anything useful in most versions of tr.

> format--this would be much better!

The complete error message gives you the exact character position at where the
problem began.  Read the file in emacs, then move to that position in the
file.  The cursor should be at the very start of an internal header line,
which is in the format:
	10-Mar-1995 08:09:28 -0800,1384;000000000021
Note the field between the comma and the semicolon (1384 in this example).
This is the size in bytes of the following message.  If the cursor is not at
the exact start of this internal header line, scroll back in the mail file and
find the internal header line of them previous message.  Check that count.
You'll find that it is wrong for some reason.

Perhaps that message got trashed, or some garbage got appended to the end of
the mail file.  Either way, either fix the count, or alter the subsequent text
so that the count is right.

I wonder if this problem below came about by using some other program to
forcibly save a Berkeley format message into a Tenex folder.  That's a very
likely scenario.  If the cursor points at "From ", then that's what you did.