Messed Up In Mailbox

[Charles H. Sampson]

My In mailbox is badly damaged. Looking at it as a text file, it's easy
to see that the contents aren't in what I've come to recognize as the
usual structure. Looking at it in Eudora, many of the messages don't
start with the proper header structure and contain parts of other
messages.

I was ready to blame this on a faulty disk but then I realized that it
is only the In mailbox and that other, non-Eudora, files are o. k. I
think I know what's going on. I'm testing it now but I want to put my
idea out here and see if anyone can confirm it.

I'm simultaneously retrieving from three mailboxes on my ISP's server. I
have a number of filters that move messages to various places, sometimes
to the In mailbox. If Eudora doesn't treat In as a shared resource, I
could have three tasks writing to the In.mbox file at the same time,
trampling over each other's work.

Is that it? Is that a known issue with Eudora? It certainly explains the
problem, but it's just a stab in the dark by me at the moment.

You might reasonably question why I have filters that move messages to
the In mailbox. If you really want to know why, I'll explain, but I'd
prefer that you just accept it as a fact at the moment.

Charlie
--
Nobody in this country got rich on his own. You built a factory--good.
But you moved your goods on roads we all paid for. You hired workers we
all paid to educate. So keep a big hunk of the money from your factory.
But take a hunk and pay it forward. Elizabeth Warren (paraphrased)

[Charles H. Sampson]

Charles H. Sampson <csam...@inetworld.net> wrote:

> My In mailbox is badly damaged. Looking at it as a text file, it's easy
> to see that the contents aren't in what I've come to recognize as the
> usual structure. Looking at it in Eudora, many of the messages don't
> start with the proper header structure and contain parts of other
> messages.
>
> I was ready to blame this on a faulty disk but then I realized that it
> is only the In mailbox and that other, non-Eudora, files are o. k. I
> think I know what's going on. I'm testing it now but I want to put my
> idea out here and see if anyone can confirm it.
>
> I'm simultaneously retrieving from three mailboxes on my ISP's server. I
> have a number of filters that move messages to various places, sometimes
> to the In mailbox. If Eudora doesn't treat In as a shared resource, I
> could have three tasks writing to the In.mbox file at the same time,
> trampling over each other's work.
>
> Is that it? Is that a known issue with Eudora? It certainly explains the
> problem, but it's just a stab in the dark by me at the moment.
>
> You might reasonably question why I have filters that move messages to
> the In mailbox. If you really want to know why, I'll explain, but I'd
> prefer that you just accept it as a fact at the moment.
>

Talking to myself:

I removed the offending filters shortly after posting the previous
message and I've had no problems since, so that was indeed probably the
cause of my problem.

Now, if I could just figure out how to recover the In mailbox, or at
least part of it.

[David Morrison]

In article <1n95nv1.1ynfef91x8ov88N%csam...@inetworld.net>,

I have always thought that Eudora checked servers sequentially. It
certain does for me, cycling through all of my e-mail accounts one after
the other. Further, I thought that all the received messages sat
somewhere temporarily until all messages had been retrieved, then they
were all filtered, again one after the other. In this model, multiple
simultaneous access to the same mailbox file would never happen.

[Charles H. Sampson]

> I have always thought that Eudora checked servers sequentially. It
> certain does for me, cycling through all of my e-mail accounts one after
> the other. Further, I thought that all the received messages sat
> somewhere temporarily until all messages had been retrieved, then they
> were all filtered, again one after the other. In this model, multiple
> simultaneous access to the same mailbox file would never happen.

That's what it looks like to me too. (I always have the Task Progress
window open.) Yet since I removed the filters that were moving things to
the In box, the problem has disappeared. I'm willing to listen to any
other explanation, since mine doesn't make a lot of sense.

[David Morrison]

> > I have always thought that Eudora checked servers sequentially. It
> > certain does for me, cycling through all of my e-mail accounts one after
> > the other. Further, I thought that all the received messages sat
> > somewhere temporarily until all messages had been retrieved, then they
> > were all filtered, again one after the other. In this model, multiple
> > simultaneous access to the same mailbox file would never happen.
>
> That's what it looks like to me too. (I always have the Task Progress
> window open.) Yet since I removed the filters that were moving things to
> the In box, the problem has disappeared. I'm willing to listen to any
> other explanation, since mine doesn't make a lot of sense.

What could be happening is that while it is filtering, it copies the
message to the new mailbox, then deletes it from In. But if your filters
are putting it back in In, then overlapping operations would seem to be
possible.

Rereading your original post, why would you want to filter messages into
In, since that is where they will be anyway? (Assuming POP. IMAP would
be different, but then it would be filtering from the IMAP inbox so the
overlap of operations should not happen.)

[Charles H. Sampson]

I was wondering how long it would be before somebody asked that. I had a
bunch of filters that just growed over time. Eventually I realized that
if certain circumstances arose, I didn't want some of the message sent
to mailbox X, I wanted them to go to In instead. So I created filters
that would detect those circumstances and send the messages to In, those
filters being placed before the ones that would otherwise send the
messages elsewhere.

Since I "analyzed" this issue, I've cleaned up this mess.