Recovered old MailSmith User Data

[Muskie McKay]

I got my old PowerMac G4 out of storage along with some old backups on external drives. I actually got Retrospect to work and got back an old copy of my MailSmith User Data. Over the years I've lost a few messages along with a lot of metadata when laptop hard drives have failed.

What is the best way to go through this old MailSmith data and find the messages I want or import them or is this just a fool's errand?

My TimeCapsule is long filled up so I'm thinking of trying to use some of these old drives and maybe even the G4 itself as a TimeMachine target, but first I wanted to try and preserve some more old data. I may just keep the oldest external drive as is, but if the G4 ever dies I'm not sure Retrospect is still in business and my copy is definitely old, I switch to several times and yes I do use SuperDuper! some but for automatic daily backups I use TimeMachine.

Cheers,

[Jeroen Scheerder]

Quoth Muskie McKay (11 Aug 2019, 5:55):

What is the best way to go through this old MailSmith data and find the messages I want or import them or is this just a fool's errand?

Well, it depends on a bit of skill.

The ~/Mail/Mailsmith User Data/Mail has a lot of stuff in it. For every mailbox, there are three items:

Knews:             data
Knews.freelist:    data
Knews.messageData: directory

The .messageData directory has a bunch of ".msgd" messages, each a file containing a single message in something that looks like mbox format to me.

Line endings are not canonical, I think; from my samples I see mostly message header parts with CRLF line termination, but message bodies with NL line termination. That might require a bit of fixing (and it might actually be anomalous, since a bit of my archive dates back to early 80s Unix mailboxes and Eudora folders).

Yet, the bit about every message being a relatively simple text file does look like it's no fool's errand. If you are prepared to grep a bit around, you should find stuff quite easily.

$ grep -rl '^From: Karl-Johan' Knews.messageData
Knews.messageData/210+MailsmithMessageData+8B05B937-A5E0-459C-89C0-72EAFBA6702E.msgd
Knews.messageData/226+MailsmithMessageData+D078D683-2F7C-4EB6-A6B1-07982D54380B.msgd
Knews.messageData/161+MailsmithMessageData+D42DC52B-3261-4D84-BECB-B2D216D9A6EB.msgd
Knews.messageData/218+MailsmithMessageData+5D4F4B79-766E-4381-9F6C-355BAEF8AF7B.msgd
Knews.messageData/242+MailsmithMessageData+A5F586F2-0DD7-4916-9790-2E3C6F2A8753.msgd
Knews.messageData/266+MailsmithMessageData+9ED5D7A9-9AD4-4AA2-9113-306113CB5193.msgd
Knews.messageData/177+MailsmithMessageData+D9D451EC-2B9B-4A1A-B5B1-A175C6465915.msgd
Knews.messageData/258+MailsmithMessageData+C23B6DBC-C862-4D11-9AEA-2106EDC15B52.msgd
Knews.messageData/234+MailsmithMessageData+AA62162C-28B0-4F74-9778-36584DCB1794.msgd
Knews.messageData/169+MailsmithMessageData+93D95CD0-9129-4434-AF6F-2542661D18F6.msgd
Knews.messageData/250+MailsmithMessageData+D7E7699A-D6FF-4691-A8F5-21E11D7A694B.msgd
Knews.messageData/201+MailsmithMessageData+E6C85112-90D8-4CFD-813A-234477CB3628.msgd
Knews.messageData/185+MailsmithMessageData+517BE6DA-F4E5-4825-9B22-397C6BBE8B57.msgd
Knews.messageData/193+MailsmithMessageData+BA3C1965-2163-4FC8-9399-BE1AB20B3B1E.msgd

Hope this helps...