[thechat] weird mail hiccup

Judah McAuley judah at wiredotter.com
Wed Apr 2 13:29:22 CST 2003


I've had that happen to me with mozilla.  The problem is a bad table of 
contents file.  All the messages get stuck together in a single file and 
you have a index file(.msf in Mozilla) to show where in the file 
messages start and stop.  If the index gets screwed up, information is 
there but not accessible in the normal manner.

To fix it, go to your mozilla mail folder (under windows, its in 
Documents and Settings > Application Data > Mozilla > your profile name 
 > some dynamic folder name > Mail > you mail account name

Note that Application Data is a hidden folder, so you have to turn on 
hidden folder views.

Each mailbox will have two files:  The mailbox name and the mailbox 
name.msf  So you inbox would be called Inbox and Inbox.msf

The .msf file is the index file.  The Inbox file contains all the email. 
  Shut down Mozilla, back up those files and then delete the .msf file 
of the mailbox you want to rebuild.  Start Mozilla up again and go into 
mail.  It should rebuild the index from the contents of the mail file 
and all should be well.  If not, then just restore the files and you're 
back to where you were.

Judah


javier velasco wrote:
> hi gang:
> 
> this morning I saw the strangest thing happen in my mail client 
> (mozilla), I downloaded last night's mails... initially, I only recieved 
> half of them (i knew some were missing since i send things to myself 
> from home to work via mail).
> 
> when I downloaded the rest, they came in all scrambled, the message body 
> did not match the subject and sender, some messages were concatenated (a 
> la digest) including contents from different lists into a single message 
> body, and other messages came in blank.
> 
> it smelled like a virus to me, but i'm quite protected both on the mail 
> server side of things and in my local machine. i scanned for virus with 
> no results and it has worked correctly thereafter. support folks also 
> checked it and found nothing strange. i upgraded to version 1.3 of 
> mozilla just in case.
> 
> anyone have a clue about what happened?
> can it happen again?
> 
> thanks
> javier




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