Subject: problem with a mbox file

From: "Harondel J. Sibble" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 02 Feb 2003 20:59:30 -0800

Hmm, during the conversion from mbox (/var/spool/mail/username) to mbx 
(~INBOX), 	I notice that one of the user's mailbox is likely corrupted (or 
something), both mbxcvt and mailutil choke on converting.  Running pine 
against the mbox file gives an error that the file is not in a valid mbox 
format. Doing a mailutil create "#driver.mbx/INBOX" works fine until I run 
pine again, then pine dies with an error "Problem detected: "Out of Memory. 
Pine exiting."

Any suggestions on what I should do next to suss out and resolve the problem 
so that I can convert this (last) mbox file to mbx?

-- 
Harondel J. Sibble 
Sibble Computer Consulting
Creating solutions for the small business and home computer user.
[email-masked] (use pgp keyid 0x3AD5C11D) http://www.pdscc.com
(604) 739-3709 (voice/fax)      (604) 686-2253 (pager)

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Feb 2003 15:30:11 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Harondel J. Sibble wrote:
> something), both mbxcvt and mailutil choke on converting.

Check to see what the first five bytes of the file are.  If there are
anything other than "From ", that's your problem; fix that and then retry.

If you have any other problems, please contact me directly and I'll help
you resolve the problem.

-- Mark --

http://staff.washington.edu/mrc
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

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From: "Harondel J. Sibble" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 03 Feb 2003 18:41:04 -0800

> anything other than "From ", that's your problem; fix that and then retry.
They aren't From lines :-(

> If you have any other problems, please contact me directly and I'll help

It actually looks like the entire mbox file is corrupted as viewing it in any 
editor, vi or joe (my prefered editor) shows most of the 30mb as binary, or 
at least non standard ascii. It's all funny characters, and inverse video 
etc. There are 3 or 4 normal ascii messages at the end of the file though, 
but most of it is toast as far as I can tell.  The copy I made of all the 
mbox files before conversion also exhibits the same issue, so off to the tape 
backup we go. Hopefully the corruption happened recently and doesn't go too 
far back in the tape rotation.