I’ve been using Eudora for a few years, with no major mishaps, although my employer’s IT support staff now claims that they “no longer support” Eudora, and they’re kind of nasty about it (though they did support it at one time, and were the ones to suggest I use it.)
Anyway, this morning when I was checking my e-mail, I seem to have hit one e-mail containing a virus that Norton identifed but didn’t get rid of. Eudora just lingered on that e-mail message for ever, neither moving to the next one nor deleting, quarantining or otherwise engaging with the virus-laden e-mail.
When I exited Eudora and re-entered, I got a screen telling me that my in-box had been corrupted, and asking me if I wanted to create a new inbox or use the old one. Since my inbox had loads of old messages that I want to keep stored, I clicked “use the old one” and now it won’t open shit for me.
I can’t go to tech support because they’ll just sneer at me and sing their “We don’t support that Eudora stuff any more. Tough luck” song and refuse to do anything, and I’m not sure what the best thing to do is here.
I’m not quite as amused as you are, I guess, Shalmanese.
Seems to me I get this a lot, “Do you want X or Y? We’re implying that there are serious consequences to making this choice, but in no way want to give you enough information to make an interilgent choice. So make up your mind, jerkface–X or Y? Either could screw you up good and proper.”
Honest, do you have any idea if I’m risking wiping out my whole inbox by checking “Yes, I want to create a new inbox”? It sure sound that way to me.
Have you tried importing your mail into another program like Outlook Express? This would give you a functional backup in case you do have to re-create the Inbox.
Or make copies of the files in question first - I think they’re inbox.mbx and inbox.___ (can’t remember the other extension). Copy them into a backup folder, then make a new inbox and see what happens.
Eudora mailboxes can be opened and edited with a plain text editor. After awhile you’ll recognize the patterns that represent the end of one message and beginning of another. Determine that first.
With Eudora closed, open your IN mailbox with text editor and select half of its contents (neatly arranging your selection to snip between two messages). Copy. Open new text document. Paste. Save with some name such as “FirstHalfInbox”. (If you are a PC user, change the extension from “.txt” to whatever Eudora uses for mailboxes on the PC. Perhaps “.mbx”??). Now go back to the IN mailbox and select the other half and repeat the process for “SecondHalfInbox”.
Open Eudora. Eudora will attempt to open the two new mailboxes. One will probably work fine and the other will probably fail. (You’ll continue to get error messages regarding your IN box, too, of course). Note which one flunked. Quit Eudora again.
Repeat process for the flunked mailbox, dividing it into two mailbox files. Continue subdividing until you’ve isolated the corrupted messages. All the other messages should be in one of the multitudes of temporary mailbox files you’ve created.
Now with Eudora closed, open IN again and delete everything in it except the first message and any beginning and/or end of file symbols, and save. (Make backup first if you wish).
Open Eudora. Delete individual message in IN box. Go to each temporary mailbox in turn and select all messages and transfer them into IN box. When done, you have a (mostly) restored IN box and a plethora of empty temporary mailboxes.
Quit Eudora once more. Discard empty temporary mailboxes.
ONE NOTE: Some characteristics of your messages will not survive this process. They may lose their labels, their priorities, and their status (all may appear as “unread”). For me this is no big deal. (Select all, mark all “read”, didn’t miss labels or priorities of old IN box messages. )