[linux-elitists] fixing a corrupted mbox

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 12:48:43PM -0400, Chris Ball wrote:

> It can be hard to avoid corrupting such a huge file.  mbox is not a

Yeah, I noticed ;)

> reasonable choice for a 2G mailbox, both due to the risk of corruption
> and the huge seek times involved.

I'm typically living at the end of the file, in a persistent screen session, 
so syncs are quick.
 
>    > I doubt I'm the only one with this problem. How do you fix this,
> 
> Restore from backup.  I suppose you could also find the corrupted area
> and just delete it, assuming it is small.

It is somewhere during the last 3 days. Will be difficult to hunt
down manually, given that there are hundreds of emails in there.
 
>    > and how do you prevent this from reoccurring? I presume maildir
>    > is a solution, though presumably on a 2 GByte mailbox it may more
>    > to be a problem.
> 
> Maildir is the solution, IMO, and there's no problem with it.  The
> size of the mbox isn't relevant; the number of mails potentially is,

Accessing a large number of small files is probably going to take forever,
and require a rather large memory footprint. Can mutt deal gracefully with few 100 kMails
through IMAP, or locally in the filesystem?

> since there's a correspondence to inodes used, but I've never had a
> problem with that because ITotal is usually in the millions.
> 
> http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/ is the preferred way
> to do the conversion, I think.

Thanks. I presume I will have to fix the mailbox first.
 
>    > So are you doing IMAP on a maildir (which filesystem?) to
>    > synchronize to multiple locations? 
> 
> Yes, with ext3.

Thanks.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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