mail problems - mbox file

[4days]

my mate's just asked me to fix thunderbird on his machine because he can't see his inbox (its blank, just sits there trying to load). had a look in his profile and the 'inbox' file is just under 2Gb!

tried zipping it up to see what would happen and it compressed to 18Mb, which makes me believe him when he says that there were just a few mp3 attachments in his inbox.

asked if he'd regularly compacted the folder and he hadn't, ever. does anyone know how to recover a file in that condition?

tried deleting the message index (so that new one could be created) but thunderbird just chokes on it.

[AmIdYfReAk]

i'm not going to lie, but i know nothing about Thunderbird, but this is kinda a shot in the dark but what i would try is this:

try and find a way to convert the Thunderdird to Outlook and see if he can get his e-mails that way, then uninstall, and reinstall Thunderbird and import the Shit back in..

That SHOULD work unless the thing is 100% corrupt.

Good luck man!

[+JuggerNaut+]

you can export mbox to another mail client like Eudora and see if that opens it up
http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderb ... html#q2.10

or, backup the current profle, nuke Tbird and reinstall.

[4days]

cheers. tried the import/export thing with no joy - the file was totally buggered

fixed it in the end, but only by moving the file to the vax (which can handily ignore reported file sizes) and bashing it with text utils. actual file with all the mail recovered was 22Mb. then re-imported it to thunderbird by telling thunderbird it was a eudora file.

didn't need it in the end, but for the benefit of anyone with a similar problem who might stumble across this thread:

http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/index.php

windows app called IMAPSize which includes utils for converting mbox to eml and vice versa.

[+JuggerNaut+]

excellent, at least you got it sorted.