Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / November 2005

Firstly; you don't have a virus. There are still no viruses in the wild
for Macs, only Word macro viruses which don't affect the Mac, but can be
passed on to Windows PeeCees.

It sounds from your description as though you have a corrupted Inbox
file.

It is simply a text file; try opening it in TextEdit and see what it
looks like. All your messages will probably be there, in readable form,
but with their headers and the formatting that enables Eudora to display
them properly.

As a first step, copy the contents of the Inbox file in a safe place;
that's the contents of Documents->Eudora folder->Mail Folder->In and, if
you are using .toc files, In.toc. (That's if your 'Eudora Folder' lives
in 'Documents' which it normally will.) It might be useful to rename
this 'In' file to 'Old in' and if necessary the .toc file to 'Old
in.toc'.

Now a suggestion that you should NOT follow right now; I'd delete the
'In' and 'In.toc' files in the Eudora Folder. When you restart Eudora,
it should recreate a new, empty 'In' mailbox to which, from what you
say, new messages will be added correctly. I suspect this is likely to
work, but I've not tried it. What does the rest of the group think?

It should then be possible to put the 'Old in' file back into the
'Eudora Folder->Mail' folder, open 'Old in' in Eudora in the normal way
and transfer any messages that look okay to the new 'In' mailbox.

As for the messages that look corrupted, apart from reading them in
TextEdit, it might be possible to go through the file and see where the
headers and formatting appear to go wrong- it might be obvious, and
repairable by eye but you're rather on your own there...

On the virus issue: there is no known virus that infects any version of
MacOS X. It is not inconceivable that you could be one of the first
victims of the first MacOS X virus, but it is extremely unlikely.

Interestingly, I have seen this sort of behavior with Mac Eudora a
couple of years ago, and it did have a virus connection. The source of
the problem was a different sort of "malware" in a sense: the user had
made the very unwise decision to install Norton Anti-Virus and
configured it to watch his email. It did so, but it did so stupidly.
When Norton saw a piece of Windows worm-spew (harmless to a Mac) it
'cleaned' the message but did nothing that would alert Eudora to that
act, and the result was a mangled index to the victim mailbox, and all
mail before the infected message was inaccessible.

The fix was pretty simple: I quit Eudora, wiped every bit of the
pointless Norton garbage off the system, and used ResEdit to remove the
index from the damaged mailbox so that Eudora would re-index it. Worked
perfectly.

I don't know that  the current version of Norton AV or any other AV
still will do that sort of damage to Eudora mailboxes when using 6.x,
but it would not surprise me at all. At present, the only risks on a Mac
from viruses and similar malware are:

1. If you run MS Word and get one of the very rare Word Macro viruses
that isn't Windows-specific.
2. If you run a Windows emulator like VirtualPC and don't run a good AV
program inside it.
3. If someone intentionally sends you one of the 'rootkit' trojan's like
Renepo/Opener and you are gullible enough to run it (complete with an
administrative password challenge...)
4. If you are one of the unfortunate few who get hit by the first real
MacOS X virus, if and when that happens.

Unfortunately, the commercial AV industry has the sort of MacOS
competence one can predict from the fact that there has been no
significant Mac malware threat for over a decade, as their main market
has exploded with new and ever-sneakier vermin. Some have brought the
aggressiveness they need on Windows to the Mac, where they lack the
competence to be that aggressive safely.