Sometimes when Eudora crashes when downloading files some of the mailbox files get corrupted.
Here’s an example of what this type of corruption looks like:
This corruption often extends through many messages in a mailbox.
The Ruby program recover_mailbox.rb will make a backup of a corrupted Eudora mailbox file and then
try to recreate an uncorrupted version of the mailbox.
After downloading the program you can run it as follows:
# cd to the directory where the corrupted Eudora mailbox files is located
path_to_ruby_executable path_to_recover_mailbox.rb corrupted_eudora_mailbox
On Mac OS X the default system ruby is located here: /usr/bin/ruby
Example:
[~]$ cd ~/Documents/Eudora\ Folder\ \(stephen\)/Mail\ Folder/
[Mail Folder]$ /usr/bin/ruby /Users/stephen/dev/ruby/src/lib/recover_corrupted_macosx_eudora_mailboxes/recover_mailbox.rb In
Making backup copy of In to ./In-backup.
Reading 6330 messages from original Eudora mailbox: In.
Writing into new Eudora mailbox: ./In-2.
Replacing original Eudora mailbox: In with: ./In-2.
A copy of the original Eudora mailbox: In is now named: ./In-backup.
Eudora has a limit on 32767 messages in a mailbox and exceeding this value will cause errors. It is helpful to archive
or delete messages before exceeding this limit.
Running mailbox-report.rb will list all mailboxes and the number of messages they contain. At the end of the process a list of all the mailboxes that contain more than 25000 messages will be repeated.
Example:
$ mailbox-report.rb /Users/stephen/Documents/Eudora\ Folder/Mail\ Folder/
processing: 777 mailboxes in path: /Users/stephen/Documents/Eudora Folder/Mail Folder/ ...
count messages path
-----------------------------------------------
1 23 0-lmts/aws
2 8 0-lmts/lab-travis
3 203 1-github/1-lab.github
...
775 175 phone-numbers
776 23 saved-bt
777 0 Trash
9 mailbox files with more than 25000 messages ...
messages path
-----------------------------------------------
25249 3-lists/rails/rails-archive/rails-07-2
25678 9-personal/1-lists/f-boats-07-08