[olug] Fw: kmail ate my inbox

[Christopher Cashell]

At Mon, 29 Nov 04, Unidentified Flying Banana Brian Wiese, said:
> Ok, so after many unsuccesful attempts at recovering my email first, I did
> find that Kmail had simply converted my inbox from MH format to Maildir. 
> Now the 2 main email storage formats are Maildir and mbox, while my
> Sylpheed only supports MH... similiar but different from Maildir.  There's
> many mbox -> maildir, but only one Maildir -> mbox that I found:

mutt makes for a handy mbox <-> Maildir converter.  Just open the
mailbox in mutt, tag all the messages in the mailbox, and then save them
to a mailbox of the target format (if going to mbox, mutt can create the
new mailbox on the fly, if going to maildir, you need a pre-existing
maildir directory (maildirmake, if needed)).

mutt also has some support for MH mail directories, but as I don't use
it, I can't comment on how well it works.

> http://www.qmail.org/qmail-manual-html/man1/maildir2mbox.html
> 
> It's a binary though, and you need to compile qmail to get the program..
> this was quite quick with debian though.
> 
> apt-get install qmail uscpi-tcp (or qmail-src)  I forget

It's less pretty, but in a pinch (if mutt isn't around) you can also
hack together something with formail, like 'cat maildir/cur/* | formail
-ds >>new_mailbox'.  It's far from ideal, but you wil end up with an
mbox (don't forget to pull anything from maildir/new/ also, if needed).

> then follow the instructions in the man pages or /usr/share/doc/... for
> how to compile it.  Sylpheed has both an import and export to mbox
> feature, so I was then able to import all my inbox mail back from 2002
> without too much problem.  I think I'll start exporting to mbox and
> compressing for now on though!  There's just _way_ too many files, when
> getting into 10k emails with MH/Maildir.

If you use Maildir/MH, you should definitely use one of the newer
filesystems, particularly ReiserFS.  Reiser was designed with a larger
number of smaller files in mind, and handles them quite well.  I seem to
recall reading that JFS, and to a lesser extent, XFS, also did quite
well with a large number of small files, *much* better than ext2/ext3
do.

Additionally, creating subdirectories to organize your mail into smaller
mailboxes can also help out.

> and my hard drive started knocking this morning, so I'm going to have to
> figure out some rsync on my home dir so that I don't loose it all when my
> drive dies out on me (wouldn't be the first time), yet I'm still so
> optimistic sometimes that I procrastinate to make backups.  =(

Wait 'till it fails entirely on you.  I can guarantee you, based on
personal experience, that the experience will cure you entirely of
backup procrastination. ;-)

> Brian

-- 
| Christopher
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| Here I stand.  I can do no other.              |
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