Mutt messed up Thunderbird!

[Cory Foy]

Hi All,

I've tried doing quite a bit of searching on this and am hoping someone can point me quickly to some resources.

I have a Thunderbird installation which I've had this side of forever. The mailboxes started on Windows, moved to Linux, went back, and went back again. Right now I am running the latest version of Thunderbird on Ubuntu.

This afternoon I was playing with accessing the Thunderbird mailboxes (Inbox) with mutt. I opened it up using mutt -f Inbox. This seemed to work fine - I could see and read all of the emails. However, when I closed mutt, it wrote back to the Inbox file (even though I hadn't done anything). When I then tried to open up Thunderbird, I found that I could see all of my messages in the message list window, but clicking on them they were either blank or a series of the raw info from the Inbox file (typically multiple messages combined).

While I had Thunderbird opened, it downloaded 2 new messages, and those seemed to work fine. But any before that were messed up. I tried peeking at the Inbox file to see if I could spot any differences offhand, but didn't see anything. I also tried correcting line endings (using %s/\r// in VI and saving it) but that didn't seem to have an effect.

Is there any hope for my Inbox? I have a backup, but it is a couple of days old (of course I didn't back up my Inbox before messing with it).

Thanks in advance,

Cory

[Nir]

Cory Foy wrote, On 05/06/08 22:53:

> Hi All,
>
> I've tried doing quite a bit of searching on this and am hoping someone can point me quickly to some resources.
>
> I have a Thunderbird installation which I've had this side of forever. The mailboxes started on Windows, moved to Linux, went back, and went back again. Right now I am running the latest version of Thunderbird on Ubuntu.
>
> This afternoon I was playing with accessing the Thunderbird mailboxes (Inbox) with mutt. I opened it up using mutt -f Inbox. This seemed to work fine - I could see and read all of the emails. However, when I closed mutt, it wrote back to the Inbox file (even though I hadn't done anything). When I then tried to open up Thunderbird, I found that I could see all of my messages in the message list window, but clicking on them they were either blank or a series of the raw info from the Inbox file (typically multiple messages combined).
>

> While I had Thunderbird opened, it downloaded 2 new messages, and those seemed to work fine. But any before that were messed up.. I tried peeking at the Inbox file to see if I could spot any differences offhand, but didn't see anything. I also tried correcting line endings (using %s/\r// in VI and saving it) but that didn't seem to have an effect.

>
> Is there any hope for my Inbox? I have a backup, but it is a couple of days old (of course I didn't back up my Inbox before messing with it).
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Cory
>
>

Cory , In TB select any message in listing pane . Copy the subject .
Close TB . Open mbox file of that folder in word editor like kate .
Search for the message using the subject , you have just copied .
When found see if the _message header_ starts with a line like this

From - Thu Apr 12 15:25:37 2007

I wonder if somehow Mutt has modified TB message header in it own way .

[Cory Foy]

-------- Original Message --------
> Cory , In TB select any message in listing pane . Copy the subject .
> Close TB . Open mbox file of that folder in word editor like kate .
> Search for the message using the subject , you have just copied .
> When found see if the _message header_ starts with a line like this
>
> From - Thu Apr 12 15:25:37 2007
>
> I wonder if somehow Mutt has modified TB message header in it own way .

Thanks. I did fine that the From line of the first message to work wasn't on it's own line, but was smashed against a Base-64 encoded attachment. I used vim to put it on its own line, and then add an extra line, and saved.

Now I'm seeing that the messages look duplicated in Thunderbird. A caching problem? Do I need to delete something else?

Cory

[Nir]

Cory Foy wrote, On 05/06/08 23:42:

Ummm , not sure . Backup that Inbox file first and delete that duplicate
from TB window.

[Cory Foy]

-------- Original Message --------
> > Thanks. I did fine that the From line of the first message to work wasn't on it's own line, but was smashed against a Base-64 encoded attachment. I used vim to put it on its own line, and then add an extra line, and saved.
> >
> > Now I'm seeing that the messages look duplicated in Thunderbird. A caching problem? Do I need to delete something else?

> Ummm , not sure . Backup that Inbox file first and delete that duplicate
> from TB window.

Thanks. I ended up needing to wipe out the Inbox.msf file, and the duplication went away.

I did a small test, and I appreciate you bearing with me since mutt was what got me into this mess. I took a small Thunderbird email folder and made two copies, one called Mail and one called MailMutt. I then opened MailMutt, read two messages, and then closed it. I then did a diff. What I saw was a lot of these:

22a23,25
> Status: O
> Content-Length: 1693
> Lines: 36
89a93,95
> Status: O
> Content-Length: 2580
> Lines: 74
188a195,197
> Status: O
> Content-Length: 2317
> Lines: 46
257a267,269
> Status: O
> Content-Length: 1856
> Lines: 39

So, it looks like Mutt added three new headers. They were placed right after the end of the original headers. I'm guessing that's what Thunderbird is taking issue with, since none of those exist in the Mail folder I copied. So I opened up my Inbox that wasn't working in vim and did the following:

:%s/^Content-Length: .*\n//
:%s/^Status: .*\nLines:/Lines:/
:%s/^Lines: .*\n//

I did status that way because when I grepped out all of the status lines, some of them looked like they may be part of a message, so I only wanted to whack the ones mutt created.

I then copied over the Inbox back to my profile folder, deleted Inbox.msf, and opened it up. There were some weird emails that were in there that were newer than my newest one (meaning, they were "received" days, months or years in the future), so I deleted those, and everything else seems hunky-dory again. This may have been the cause, or it might simply have been something else, but either way it's working.

Thanks a ton again for the help!

Cory