Subject: In Mail

From: "Dan J. Keenan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 14:40:04 -0600 (CST)

In trying to pull up in-mail, I'm getting a message at bottom of my
screen:"file/usr/spool/mail/dkeenan is not in valid mailbox format"
Believe this was an e-mail from someone that I responded to and tried
to delete their message and mine, and I must have hit something odd.
Any clues as to how to rid myself of this?
Thanks.

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From: "Adam H. Kerman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 15:56:05 -0600 (CST)

>From: "Dan J. Keenan" <[email-masked]>
>Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 14:40:04 -0600 (CST)

>Any clues as to how to rid myself of this?

If your inbox is hosed, I don't know how you'll read this.

You need to tell us what kind of Unix your mail server uses, and what the
proper format your mailboxes should be in.

I will assume "Berkeley". You likely ruined the first line. This is the format
for a proper boundary:

>From [email-masked] Sat Feb 14 15:35:54 1998

It must be the first line of the first message in a mailbox. For subsequent
messages, it must follow a blank line.

Copy your inbox to a tempory folder in your mail directory in your home
directory. Fix the file with a text editor, substituting the sample boundary
line I gave above for any broken lines. If all goes well, you should be able to
read the folder like any other message folder in pine. If you can read it, copy
your inbox to another file and delete your inbox. You should be able to read
any new messages. Look at the second copy of the inbox you made, and see if any
new messages were appended to it, and copy those messages with a text editor to
another temporary file in mail (preserving the boundary line, of course). And,
read these messages in pine.

It's not recommended that you edit your inbox directly, since other processes
are delivering messages to it.

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From: "Dan J. Keenan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Feb 1998 16:18:37 -0600 (CST)

Thanks much...think we got it all fixed through systems assistance.