How do I read mail backups?

Question

How do I read mail backups?

Hi All,
So we have a guy here who dutifully backs up his email. Hooray for that! Now he wants to be able to read those emails saved to DVD.

Here's what he's been burning...
On one disk you will find Deleted Messages.mbox, Drafts.mbox, INBOX.mbox, Junk.mbox, MessageUidsAlreadyDownloaded, and Sent Messages.mbox.

In say, the INBOX.mbox there is content_index, Info plist, mbox, and table_of _contents. Everything in this folder other than the Info plist is a Unix Executable file.

So, how can he pop in one of these DVD's and paroose his old emails with out importing the entire DVD or old Inbox. Is there a reader out there for this. It seems counter productive to have to import everything just to find one old email. We just get way too much email here to let it sit on the computers, but we never know when we'll need to find it again.

Thoughts?

7TB Xserve RAID, MacBook Pro AND an Apple ][+ with a Zenith green screen!, Mac OS X (10.4.8), Beer, VCR, "Buckaroo Banzai"... Some assembly required.

Posted on Oct 23, 2006 7:54 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 23, 2006 9:01 AM in response to Deepish Thought

Hi Deepish Thought.

You won't be able to view the content of those mailboxes in Mail without importing them first. You can, however, view the contents of the mbox file (where all the messages themselves are stored) with a text editor if that's all you need.

BTW, the files you mention would be from a computer running Mac OS X 10.3.x. If that's the case, because of the differences between Mail 1.x and Mail 2.x, discussing your problem here might confuse other users running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), so please start a new topic in the Mail & Address Book - Mac OS X 10.3 & earlier forum if you want to further discuss this.

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Answer 2

Oct 23, 2006 10:15 AM in response to Deepish Thought

Hmmm. Well, we just upgraded this guy to 10.4 from 10.3. The backup he made would have been done with 10.3.

So, now that he want's to view old email from before the upgrade. It's a real bummer that there isn't an app that can do this. All it would need to be is a reader that would format it in the style of Mail or an equivilent.

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Answer 3

Oct 23, 2006 10:32 AM in response to Deepish Thought

Archiving mail to view it out of Mail is not the same as making backups of Mail's data. Pretending that doing the latter will allow you to do the former out of the box is wrong.

Here's a list of third-party archiving solutions for Mail if that's what you want:

http://www.hawkwings.net/plugins.htm#archive

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Answer 4

Oct 23, 2006 10:54 AM in response to Deepish Thought

A bit more of what's going on here...

We just tried to import the data from his last backup and there was nothing there... So...

I think I understand what's going on here, at least to some degree. I just had him show me what he's been doing to archive mail. He had set up his library>mail file as a point in his dock. He's been burning copies of that folder and then going back into mail and deleting the old emails.

Previously (OS 10.3), he'd been able to pop that disk into the computer and mail would spot it and let him look through the files. But no more since 10.4 was installed.

I just imported the contents of his last backup but, of course, last month's emails aren't there. Now that he's running 10.4, the file configuration in the library is different and the info he's looking for doesn't reside where he expects it to anymore.

Do I have this right? or I'm I deranged? (To be fair, I smashed my head into a steel I-beam in my basement last night so I'm feeling a bit thick today.)

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Answer 5

Oct 23, 2006 11:04 AM in response to Deepish Thought

We just tried to import the data from his last backup
and there was nothing there

What do you mean?

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Answer 6

Oct 23, 2006 11:16 AM in response to David Gimeno Gost

Ok, Sorry about that. That was a gross generalization.

The hoped for "backed up" emails (late Sept to early October) weren’t there. What he did have on the DVD was some truly ancient emails that he didn't even know he had. Ones from 2004 and 2005. Very strange.

I did a search on his computer and found the 2004-5 emails by doing a search by date. He was dumfounded as to how those could have been there. I don't know either as that was well before I came along to work here. (I've only been here for about 7 months).

I grabbed the backup DVD that he made in September, before we upgraded him from 10.3 and all the emails were there. This leads me to believe that now that he's running 10.4, he can't do his back up in the same manner.

I haven't checked yet, but I'm willing to bet that all those 2004 and 2005 emails will be burned on all the previous back up DVD's that he's got. He just never looked back that far because he didn't need to.

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Answer 7

Oct 23, 2006 1:22 PM in response to Deepish Thought

Sorry, but I’m getting lost here. At this point I don’t know what the problem is, if any. I do know that the contents of ~/Library/Mail/ can be backed up and imported back into Mail 2.x as Mail for Mac OS X.

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