52041 - Mailbox emergency repair

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(MailNews Core :: Networking: POP, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

Sometimes, mailboxes get corrupted for whatever reason, and we might fail to
read them. I don't know, if that can occur in Mozilla (if not, mark INVALID),
but there are reports that it can happen in 4.x.

It would be nice, if the mailboxes could be repaired by a program supplied by
us. This program could be incorporated in Mozilla (with the advantage that it
could start the repair automatically) or be a standalone tool (with the
advantage, that it can be used, even if we don't detect the problem) or both.

It could offer the following functions:
- Remove cache files (e.g. *.msf)
- Edit the mbox file
  - displaying the recognized headers and failures to recognize them
  - offering to select and delete (possibly corrupted) parts of it

This would enable users to recover from fatal errors on our side by themselves.

Comment 1

[jefft]

adding mail4 keyword 

Comment 2

[scottputterman]

reassigning jefft's bugs to naving

Comment 3

[scottputterman]

marking nsbeta1-

Comment 4

[Stuart Burns]

Is there any progress on this, as some of us need it :)

Comment 5

[Alex Jay]

I really need to recover my mails ... :o/

Comment 6

[Adam Masri]

Platform: PowerBook G4/1GHz/1GB/60GB, MacOS X 10.2.3
Fizzilla build: 2002121216

One of the strangest corruption issues I've ever seen happened with Moz on MacOS
X. Moz would crash when I clicked a particular multilingual email message (don't
remember what language). So, I figured I'd just open the mailbox file and
manually extract it w/a text editor (BBEdit).

I opened the mailbox file. I found the message. The entire message was repeating
on a single line. Imagine a line of text, then another, then another, but all
the lines redrawn on a single line w/no CRs. What was bizarre about this was
that this was in BBEdit! I cut the message, then pasted into TextEdit, which
"expanded" the message (CRs started showing up again). I then repasted it back
into my mailbox file in BBEdit, saved, and everything was fine after that.

I wish I'd kept the message, to show what happened. But it would be great if
this tool could completely reconstruct a mailbox file, right down to carriage
returns, to be sure it's valid.

- Adam

Comment 7

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

mass re-assign.

Comment 8

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

sorry for the spam.  making bugzilla reflect reality as I'm not working on these bugs.  filter on FOOBARCHEESE to remove these in bulk.

Comment 9

[Peter Weilbacher]

Is this not fixed in the meantime by the "Rebuild Summary File" option under <folder context menu> -> Properties... -> General Information?

Comment 10

[Peter Weilbacher]

Marking as fixed (by bug 344846).