Subject: IS MY INBOX GONE FOR GOOD? PLEASE HELP!

From: [email-masked] (Rutoskey - John)
Date: 21 Aug 1996 14:50:36 GMT

While away on vacation, someone sent me some extensive e-mail consisting 
of many letters. I had not been regularly maintaining my inbox for a 
while, and of course it got very full. 

One day, my inbox crashed, giving me the message "core dumped", and 
locking me out of pine until I went off line and back in again. Well, 
when I did, my entire inbox had been eliminated, showing me an empty 
inbox with zero messages. In my Unix home directory, it shows that there 
is a large file called "core" now, which I downloaded, hoping that it was 
the inbox's dumped text. I was wrong, however, it looks like a bunch of 
garbage, completely indecipherable. I did save this onto my hard disc, 
however, but I deleted it from my UNIX account.

My question is: Does my old inbox exist anywhere in UNIX-land? I find it 
hard to believe that UNIX would have dumped it, being it is so 
intelligent, I would think it just put it somewhere. I wouldn't care so 
much, except that I really needed the info, and casnnot get it again. 

Any help would be appreciated.

John

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From: Mike Brudenell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 1996 09:10:57 +0100 (BST)

On 21 Aug 1996, Rutoskey - John wrote:

> One day, my inbox crashed, giving me the message "core dumped",

Firstly a little bit of terminology... your INBOX is just a file
containing e-mail messages; it can't crash - only programs can crash.

In actual fact what will have happened is that the mail program you were
using to look at your INBOX (I presume this was Pine as you are asking
about this on a Pine discussion group?  You don't say!) crashed.

> and 

On UNIX systems a crashing program often dumps a copy of the memory it has
in use in to a file called "core".  This may be of help to a programmer
familiar with such files and debugging tools in tracing the problem that
occured.  However the core file doesn't contain your messages.

> much, except that I really needed the info, and casnnot get it again. 

You should ask your local Help Desk for assistance.  They will be familiar
with how the mail programs are configured on the computers you use.  In
particular some sites move mail from the delivery area to other folders.

The Help Desk staff should also have the ability to rummage around on your
computers in likely places for your lost INBOX file and, if the worst
comes to the worst, possibly be able to restore it from a backup tape.

None of us at sites elsewhere around the world can do this for you.

> Any help would be appreciated.

Could I please put in a plea at this point aimed at others with problems
like this? ... Very often your local Help Desk staff are in a *far* better
position to help you than a collection of random people around the world
who know nothing about your site, let alone the computer systems in use
there.

Please consider asking your local support staff first about problems using
Pine.  This list is far more usefully used discussing bugs, new feature
requests and suggestions, etc.

Cheers,

Mike Brudenell                                         <[email-masked]>
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