Re: [Evolution] Recovering cached mail

[Andrew Montalenti <ajm pixelmonkey org>]

Mbox files are defined as rfc822 mail messages split by a blank line and
a line starting with From_, which is F, r, o, m and a space.

It's possible some of the lines in your mbox file don't follow this
convention, and maybe that's why Evolution is having a hard time parsing
it.

For example, I know many times messages have a From:_ line, rather than
a From_ line.  The colon matters.  So you may have to do some manual
replacements, e.g. in vim you can do :%s/^From: /From /g.

I hope that helps.  From some quick googling there are some scripts that
do guesses like this on the web.  You can look for Maildir to mbox
conversion.

Andrew 

On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 14:44 +1100, James McCaw wrote:
> That is the first thing I tried, except I didn't have the spaces
> between the concatenated files...I'll give it a shot...
>
> Unfortunately it doesn't seem to work. The "file" command claims my
> concatenated file is indeed RFC 822 mail text, but when dumped into
> ~/.evolution/mail/local it doesn't show up in evolution (a directory
> appears but it doesn't have any emails in it).
>
> "file" run on files in ~/.evolution/mail/local indicates that they are
> "ISO-8859 mail text, with very long lines" so the question is now: How
> does one (easily!) convert an RFC 822 file to the appropriate
> evolution local directory format?
>
> Thanks for your input Andrew.
>
> Cheers
> James
>
> On 09/02/07, Andrew Montalenti <ajm pixelmonkey org> wrote:
> > If those really are rfc822 mail files, you could probably just
> > concatenate them together (which would produce an mbox file) and copy
> > the mbox file to ~/.evolution/mail/local/.
> >
> > Something like:
> >
> > cd ~/.evolution/mail/exchange/<acct>/personal/sub/folders/Saved\ Items/
> > cat * >cache-mbox
> > mv cache-mbox ~/.evolution/mail/local/
> >
> > It's possible that the rfc822 files do not end with a blank line.  If
> > that's so, the above may not work (mbox files are rfc822 messages
> > separated by blank lines).
> >
> > When the cache-mbox file is in the evolution local mail directory,
> > restarting evolution should get it to show up in your folder list.
> >
> > HTH, I am not an evolution expert (just user),
> > Andrew
> >
> > On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 18:40 +1100, James McCaw wrote:
> > > Hi evolution mailing list
> > >
> > > Today I accidently deleted some mail (only about 30 messages) from an
> > > exchange server account. I discovered I have a locally cached copy in
> > > the directory ~/.evolution/mail/exchange/<account name>/personal/sub
> > > folders/Saved Items/
> > >
> > > In that directory there are two binary files "cmeta" and "summary" and
> > > a directory "cache" (with subdirs full of the RFC 822 mail files). I
> > > can confirm that the 30 missing messages are there by examing the
> > > files in "cache" one by one.
> > >
> > > Unfortunately I can't find a way to recover those files or import them
> > > back into evolution. The File->Import dialog doesn't allow me to
> > > import those files.
> > >
> > > Any tips? Thanks in advance for any replies.
> > >
> > > Cheers
> > > James