MailSmith and Mojave - end of the road?

[Jeroen Scheerder]

Hi,

Yesterday, I gave MailSmith a go on a Mojave system. It started fine and showed my mailboxes.

However, when starting a new message it terminated (crashed) immediately. Reproducably. Given that Mailsmith is no longer under active development, will not be upgraded for 64-bit macOS compatibility, and future features or bug fixes are not in any way guaranteed to happen that might mean the end.

Which begs the question of message recovery, getting the stuff from ~/Mail/Mailsmith\ User\ Data/Mail.

What I'm seeing for each $mailbox is:
- $mailbox - a data file of a structure I don't recognize, filled mainly by NULL characters (a map or index?)
- $mailbox.freelist - a data file of size 0, 8, or 16 bytes
- $mailbox.messageData, a directory containing text files, each with a header part (line endings CRLF) starting with a mbox-style 'From ' line, and a body part some of which have CRLF and sometimes CR line termination

That looks pretty easy to convert to some or other generic import format, may that's not even necessary. But it can't hurt to ask:

• Anybody having better experiences with Mailsmith on Mojava?
• Any chance of just a little more longevity for Meilsmith, i.e. a 2.4.4 with minor tweaks to keep going?
• Anyone written een conversion/extraction tool for the Mailsmith message database?

Cheers, Jeroen.

[Rich Siegel]

On 9/26/18 at 2:51 AM, j...@xs4all.nl (Jeroen Scheerder) wrote:

> However, when starting a new message it terminated (crashed)
> immediately. Reproducably.

Crash log?

R.
--
Rich Siegel Mailsmith Maintainer
<sie...@mailsmith.org> <http://www.mailsmith.org/>

[Jeroen Scheerder]

Quoth Rich Siegel (26/09/2018):

> However, when starting a new message it terminated (crashed)
>> immediately. Reproducably.
>
>
> Crash log?

Here are a few. Crash reporter doesn't start, but the logs do appear in ~/Library/DiagnosticReports.

[Rich Siegel]

On 9/26/18 at 8:58 AM, j...@xs4all.nl (Jeroen Scheerder) wrote:

>Here are a few. Crash reporter doesn't start, but the logs do appear
>in ~/Library/DiagnosticReports.

Thanks. This is a bug in the OS. I've reported it, and if I can
get someone to pay attention and fix it for an OS update, great.

If not, you won't be able to create new messages but you can
still start the application and use its built-in export facility.

Or you could buy a VMware Fusion license, set up a 10.13 virtual
machine, and run Mailsmith in it.

[Rich Siegel]

This bug has been fixed for a forthcoming update to macOS 10.14.
(There's no application-level workaround.)

[Michael Tsai]

> On Sep 26, 2018, at 2:51 AM, Jeroen Scheerder <j...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> • Anyone written een conversion/extraction tool for the Mailsmith message database?

Yes, EagleFiler will import the selected messages/mailboxes from Mailsmith. It also preserves the message flags, labels, and notes (which are not in the message data files).

--Michael

[Jeroen Scheerder]

Rich Siegel:

>Thanks. This is a bug in the OS. I've reported it, and if I can get
>someone to pay attention and fix it for an OS update, great.

It seems to be fixed with yesterday's 10.14.1 update.