Mac Forum / Applications / Eudora / May 2008

It's my understanding that the above is true, but I just want to check.

My spouse is not always meticulous about cleaning up old email files,
and has been through multiple Macs since 1984.  

As a result of this, and some fumbling attempts to clean up these files
made by me and by her, she now has a Mail folder on a Leopard MacBook in
which there are 825 messages in the primary "In" box, along with dozens
of similarly overloaded older mailboxes recovered from earlier backups
(some of them probably duplicates).

As a result we have a situation where in general there seems to be no
correlation at all between what the message line in any mailbox window
says in  List view, and what message actually opens when you click that
message line.

My proposal to clean up this disarray:

1)  Select the older "Use .toc files" option in Eudora settings.

2)  Maybe delete all existing .toc files (if there are any), just to get
a fresh start on all mailboxes (???).

3)  Rebuild each mailbox by clicking in the lower left corner.

4)  Maybe, in some cases, before doing this select all the messages in a
given box and use the Transfer menu to move them to a new mailbox (the
idea being that this will cause the new mailbox to be built with a .toc
based on the actual messages in the older mailbox???).

5)  Do a lot of hoping and praying --- maybe even do a ritual sacrifice
of an SE30 or PowerBook from the attic.

Any better ideas?

On Fri, 09 May 2008 03:34:01 -0500:

This is not what's properly called "rebuilding the TOC file."

The "compact mailbox" action actually rebuilds the MAIL (content) file,
based upon the assumed correctness of the TOC file,
which itself undergoes no change at all,
except for updating the offsets to where messages start
in the mail file (that's what is already wrong,
if you click on TOC entries and get unrelated messages).

If the TOC was already out of sync with the mail,
then "compacting" the mail file has a good chance
of irreparably damaging the mail file,
after which full recovery may become impossible.

"Rebuilding the TOC file" really means DELETING the TOC,
then letting Eudora create a new one, which is then
assured to match the mail, restoring any lost synchronization
(provided that the mail file wasn't already previously damaged itself);
at the same time, information which was _only_ in the TOC file
(e.g. message status, labels, edited subject info) is lost,
or reverted to default values.

If you have "separate" TOC files, then simply deleting the TOC file
will cause Eudora to rebuild it when you next start Eudora.

If your TOCs are in the resource forks,
a possible rescue (how to fix and/or delete a TOC in resource fork,
before "compacting" garbles the entire mailbox) might be found in:

"How to Fix Corrupt Eudora Mailboxes"
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9545 [04 Apr 2008]

Additional related info:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.eudora.mac/msg/4eb8270c77c55793

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