Mailboxes completely lost

I am using 5.11 - I've been told to stay away from 5.2 - too many problems with it :-(

I believe this is a characteristic of all versions of Eudora--I have had mailbox problems with previous versions if there happened to be a system crash while Eudora was opened.

The only solution I have seen is to periodically back up your files. MS Backup and restore actually works, I've don it!!

See if this helps

Missing Mail / Corrupt Mailboxes (Windows)
Document ID: 2067HQ

ISSUE:

When I Start Eudora OR Open a mailbox, I receive an error telling me that the <mailbox name> has a Damaged Table of Contents and I am given three options. After this step, I open my mailbox to find that all my mail is gone.

SOLUTION:

Check your other mailboxes to make sure the messages weren't transferred to another mailbox. If none of your other mailboxes contain the missing mail, chances are that the mailbox in question has become corrupted. If you don't have a recent backup, you can try the following steps to recover the mail.

1. QUIT Eudora. Do Not Leave Eudora running.

2. Open the directory that Eudora is installed in.

3. Find the .MBX and .TOC files for the mailbox that used to have your mail. For example, if the mail is missing from your In mailbox, look for the files in.mbx and in.toc.

4. Make backup copies of the .MBX and .TOC files right now. Move them into another safe directory - such as your Desktop. Make absolutely sure that you've made a backup copy of the files.

5. Back in your Eudora directory, delete the .TOC file for the corrupted mailbox. Do not delete the .MBX file - only the .TOC file. For example, if the mail is missing from your In mailbox, delete the in.toc file from the Eudora directory. Do not delete the In.mbx.

6. Now start Eudora and open the corrupted mailbox. It may give you an error message that the mailbox needs to be rebuilt - tell it to create a new table of contents.

NOTE: If the mailbox has a large number of messages in it, do not double click on it more then once. Allow ample time for Eudora to correctly create the Table of Contents for the damaged mailbox.

If the mailbox does not display your old mail or if Eudora crashes, the mailbox is irreparably damaged or corrupted.

You can make a final ditch effort to try to recover the text of the email. With Eudora completely closed, go to the backup of the .MBX that you saved in Step #4 above. Open that .MBX with a Text Editor, like Notepad or Wordpad. If there's any recoverable data, a Text Editor may be able to read it.

TO AVOID THIS IN THE FUTURE:

Use the Special: Compact Mailboxes Menu once a day. This procedure will remove all the unusable space in all of the mailboxes so that the TOC and MBX match exactly in their representation of the actual data.

Also, the In, Out, and Trash mailboxes are the primary mailboxes in Eudora. These mailboxes are loaded into memory upon startup of Eudora - so if they get excessively large, you risk causing slowdowns in Eudora and you may increase the chances of Data corruption. It is a good practice to routinely Empty Trash and to transfer old messages from the In and Out boxes to other mailboxes in Eudora.

Most importantly, remember to make regular backups of all your important data.


DATE MODIFIED: 2/10/03

KEYWORDS: EPWIN, MAILBOXES, MAIL, COMPACT, LOST, DATA, CORRUPTION, TABLE OF CONTENTS


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In my case, the mbx file in question was essentially lost. The mbx file before the crash was one size (fairly large since I don't trash mail as thoroughly as I should) and the size after the crash was a fraction of the original size. I also did not have any luck trying to recover the original file with various file recovery utilities. In the end, it was a blessing in disguise as it was basically a &quot;forced&quot; deletion of stuff I should have trashed years ago.

Doug,
One tip that Eudora gives that should help in the future is not to let your inbox or outbox get more to than 1 MB. This can be stretched with tons of RAM and lots of resources. Another tip is not to keep too many mailboxes open at the same time as each one uses about 1-2% resources. This is especially important in Win98 and WinME which have resource problems, but with Win2K or XP it's not much of a problem.
Still it's a same to lose a lot of email if you use it for reference.

Don't let your in box get larger than 1mb? That seems extremely small. I often have more than 1mb of mail waiting for me on the email server when I log in, let alone what I leave sitting in the in box. Are you sure about this recomendation?

I'm only passing on what Eudora says. It might be only applicable to people using an OS like WinME which has limited resources. I also keep more than 1 MB in my inbox but I'm now using Win 2000. When I did use WinME Eudora crashed frequently when I allowed the inbox to reach this number and/or when I kept too many mailboxes open. I have filters set up for over 1600 mailboxes and get about 150 emails a day so when I allowed the mailboxes to open on downloading, it would often cause a crash. So I turned off the Tools| Options | Getting Attention | Open Mail Box function. It virtually ended the crash problem.