Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / January 2007

Compacting the mailboxes also actually deletes any messages that have
been deleted, so if any of the desired messages are erroneously marked
by Eudora as deleted, compacting the mailboxes will remove them.  I
think it would be worth trying in this case, though, since David has
made backups that he can work with if the original is damaged.

Just got back from Christmas dinner with a friend.  Hope everyone else
who celebrates Christmas had a good one.  (I'm at the tail end of the
world WRT celebrating such holidays, due to my time zone.)

David had asked:

Please pardon a Windows Guy (me) dropping in for a visit :)

I'm looking at the Mac 6.2 User Guide,
which says that clicking any mailbox size display
*compacts* that mailbox (not rebuilds the TOC),
while using the Option key compacts *all* mailboxes
("Using Modifiers and Shortcuts" on page 312,
also top of page 145) -- if any messages were
marked as deleted, this would supposedly
actually lose all of them, permanently,
rather than recover anything.

At top of page 368, an option is described which selects
whether TOCs are stored in the Resource Forks
or in separate files -- but we'd better first consider
the following article, which despite its subject
seems to contain relevant information:

"Migrating From Windows to MAC"
http://eudora.com/techsupport/kb/1644hq.html

The above article says that to transfer a mailbox file
from a Windows system to a Mac, discard the Windows version
of each TOC file and copy only the MBX file, adjusting
content for CRLF, and each file name to remove ".mbx"

Apparently, then, Eudora will rebuild the TOC
whenever a mailbox on the Mac doesn't have one,
and the article then further says:

"The mailboxes will show up in Eudora
when you launch it on the Macintosh,
although the status
(read, unread, sent, forwarded, etc.)
and label information will be lost."

That's exactly what will disappear in the Windows versions
as well, whenever a TOC is actually discarded, forcing the TOC
to actually be *rebuilt* (rather than compacting the mailbox
using the *existing* TOC) -- the former preserves all
messages in the mailbox, even those once marked for deletion,
while the latter will eliminate any messages from the mailbox
that had been deleted in the TOC (as well as corrupting
a mailbox whose TOC got out of sync with the mailbox).

So if you really want to *rebuild* a TOC,
it's necessary to *delete* the existing TOC,
not compact the mailbox, and in the process
of rebuilding the TOC, status and label
information for the messages in that mailbox
is necessarily lost.

As to how to delete a TOC, that would seem to depend
upon your current "Use old-style '.toc' files" option
(top of page 368) -- whichever way that is set
determines whether your TOC is a separate file
or is in the Resource Fork of your mailbox file.

But on December 20, David wrote:

Was Eudora closed while SplitForks was run?

Did the original status info and any label info disappear
after the Resource fork of a mailbox was removed?
(According to the above, it should have been,
if the TOC was actually in the Resource Fork,
rather than in a separate file).

If the TOC was rebuilt and lost messages were not found,
it would appear that the lost messages simply weren't
in that mailbox file at that time.

How did this all begin?

Are there any implications of being offline at that time,
per "Transferring IMAP messages" on page 124?

Where is that space -- on the local Mac disk, or on the server?

Were your local Mac mailboxes "download headers only,"
with the complete messages only on the server?

With POP, it's very obvious at all times where everything is,
while with IMAP, the whole idea is for the files to be
server-side, not Mac-side, except for what in the Windows
version is a temporary "local mailbox/message cache" in a
subfolder named IMAP -- perhaps that folder would have contained
the sought-after deleted messages, but I really don't know;
if it ever happens again, you could find out.

Hope this helps, and thanks for permitting me to comment.

-[ ]-