Recovering .emlxpart and .partial.emlx mail files

Question

Recovering .emlxpart and .partial.emlx mail files

Here's the situation. I had some email on an IMAP server and it vanished. I had backed up my ~/Library/Mail folder, so I had copies of the local copies that Mail.app stored on my machine. I was able to recover the emails by copying them into a folder of the form ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/temp.mbox/Messages and Rebuilding, except that those messages that had attachments don't show up. These messages are stored in multiple files, for example

70791.partial.emlx
70791.2.emlxpart

The partial.emlx file contains the original message headers and the .emlxpart file contains the attachment (encoded). How can I get this back into Mail.app into a local mailbox?

Thanks!

G5, Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Jul 12, 2006 8:24 AM

Answer 1

Jul 12, 2006 9:47 AM in response to Benjamin Lotto

Benjamin,

I can think of two options:

• some manual file editing:
open both, the "partial" and "emlxpart" files with a text editor - the "partial" file contains the message text without the attachment, the "emlxpart" contains one attachment only. You could copy the complete contents of the emlxpart into the partial file (it probably should be towards the end after some lines like

--Boundary (IDtg0wOjYDNtyV9SW9EZ+ozA)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Type: application/zip;
x-mac-type=5A495020;
name=1995.zip;
x-mac-creator=0
X-Apple-Content-Length: 133488
Content-Disposition: inline;
filename=1995.zip

(make sure to keep a blank line between the last of those lines and the beginning of what you copy) Now you also will have to adjust the number at the very beginning of the emlxpart file (first line) - add the number of characters you just copied to the number which was there before and then save the file as something like 12345.emlx
(I haven't actually tried this but it should work;-)

• Try to create mbox files from your emlx(partial/part) files using emlx to mbox converter. You should then be able to import tose mbox files using Mail's "Import" feature (this will import all message as unread and lose all flags and things you might have set but should be much easier)

Andreas

Answer 2

Jul 12, 2006 11:00 AM in response to Benjamin Lotto

emlx to mbox converter did the trick! Thanks, Andreas.