[linux-elitists] fixing a corrupted mbox

[Chris Ball]

[Oops, I left a CC: intact in this reply.  Resending.]

Hi,

   > It's one of these days, my mutt's mbox is corrupted, again.  It
   > might be the size (2152964606 Bytes) though I thought that has
   > been fixed a long time ago.

It can be hard to avoid corrupting such a huge file.  mbox is not a
reasonable choice for a 2G mailbox, both due to the risk of corruption
and the huge seek times involved.

   > 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.

   > 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,
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.

   > So are you doing IMAP on a maildir (which filesystem?) to
   > synchronize to multiple locations? 

Yes, with ext3.

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>
One Laptop Per Child