Re: [VM] Unreadable VM-mail folders

[Uday S Reddy]

Dr. Rainer Woitok writes:

> Greetings,
> 
> does anybody have some pointers regarding the following problem?
> 
> Environment: 1: vm 7.17 with XEmacs 21.4.19 on Solaris
>              2: vm 7.17 with XEmacs 21.4.22 under Cygwin on Vista

Are you sure you are using VM 7.17?  It is very very old.  The info file
says it was released on 6th July, 2003!

At a minimum, you should upgrade to VM 7.19, which is still available on the
Wonderworks web site.  Some of these problems could have been fixed there.

In due course, you might also want to upgrade to the current public release
of VM, available at http://www.nongnu.org/viewmail/.

(Warning: Every time you upgrade, you need to look through the NEWS file to
see whether there are any changes that affect you.)

> Problem: On the Solaris host I maintain  a bunch of VM-mail folders, and
> "vm"  doesn't  have any  problems  displaying  them.   However,  when  I
> transfer some of these folders  to my Vista  laptop using, for instance,
> Mercurial, that is, without converting "\n" to "\r\n", "vm" under Cygwin
> sees fewer mails in some of these folders, while XEmacs doesn't have any
> problems to open these files and  read them in their entirety.  At least
> in  some cases the  last  mail  displayed  by Cygwin's "vm"  was  a MIME
> message with a  multi-part  body, but I  don't  know if this is  of  any
> significance.

Emacs and VM can work with both "\n" files and "\r\n" files, independent of
which operating system they are running on.  But if you intermix "\n"
messages and "\r\n" messages, then Emacs and VM won't be able to handle
them.  

You can use dos2unix and unix2dos programs, available on Cygwin, to clean
the line-endings.

> However, when I hit "D"  twice while displaying  the last message in the
> "vm" under Cygwin,  I can see that  all the remaining  mails are in fact
> catenated to this last mail, with the "From " line normally starting the
> next mail immediately  following the  last line of the preceeding  mail.
> And if I manually prepend the offending  "From " with another "\n", "vm"
> under Cygwin will see some more mails in the folder.

If the messages have gotten bunched together in the folder, you would be
best advised to repair the folder before you start reading it in VM.  The
mbox format requires at least one blank line before the "From " line, with
the *correct* line ending format, i.e., whatever line-ending your mail
folder is using.  See the Wikipedia page on "mbox" to find out more about
the mail folder format.

Cheers,
Uday

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