Re: clean start

From: Howard Schwartz (theo@ncal.verio.com)
Date: Sat, 11 Jul 1998 23:30:38 -0700 (PDT)

jcperez1@ix.netcom.com wrote:
>I still want to know how to fix this sort of problem for the next time.
> As far as I can understand, the inbox file became corrupted in such
>a way, that new msgs were being appended but were not appearing on the list.
>I couldn't tell, by looking at the file with a text reader, what was wrong. I
>noticed what appeared to be codes at the start of most msgs in the file
>but I have no idea what function these codes served or what they meant.
>Does anyone know how the individual msgs in the inbox file are delimitted?
>Does anyone know how these msgs are tagged so that Yarn can treat them as
>"new", "old", "read", etc.?
>
One way this can happen is if an end-of-file character (^Z) sneaks into
the middle of inbox somewhere. Then most text readers will not read
text past the EOF character.

To test this for yarn I inserted a ^Z in the middle of my inbox file -
brave soul that I am. Yarn not only did not recognize most of my mail
messages, it went nuts in a typical way: Prior to inserting the EOL,
my inbox file was perhaps 3K in size. After the EOL, yarn inserted a
million null characters in the file, increasing its apparent size to -
over 11Megs!

I also fixed this in a typical way for me: I deleted all null characters
from the file, and made sure all end of line characters were Unix style
newline characters only. Then I did a search/replace, inserting the file,
From

before all (message separating) lines that began with one or more control
characters and continued with the word, "Received:". I also deleted the
initial control characters. Now I had a file, roughly in Unix mail
box format. I then imported this file into yarn with:

import -r filename <RETURN>

This gave me all my messages back. I did not find the yarn utilities,
unfolder or editfold helpful in editing or repairing the damaged inbox
file, although I tried them.

In Unix mailbox format, statuses like read, new, saved, etc. are indicated
with a line in the message header that starts with Status: I dont know
if yarn uses this same line to track the status of its mail messages.