[Gllug] Corrupted Thunderbird mbox

[Richard Jones]

On Sun, Dec 11, 2005 at 03:45:18PM +0000, john levin wrote:
> Also suggested (offlist) was cat; cat opened the file, to reveal 
> thousands of: ^@^@
> so I guess everything has been overwritten somehow. Ah well.

Mboxes are just plain text files, so cat / more / less / etc.  can be
used to view them.  There's a very simplified example here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox#Example

In your case however the ^@ indicates that the file is full of ASCII
null characters - lots of zero bytes - which indicates that you've
probably either got nasty disk corruption, or else some application
has written zeroes over the file somehow.

Using 'strings filename' might reveal if there's anything in the file
worth recovering.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
Merjis - web marketing and technology - http://merjis.com
Team Notepad - intranets and extranets for business - http://team-notepad.com
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