Eudora - lost mails and address book

[rans6andrew]

Today, when my partner booted up her machine, it was a bit "odd" getting started. Firefox was reluctant to launch, IE came up slowly. Eudora opened, after a fashion, but she quickly found that ALL of her inbox messages (probably more than 500 mails) between 23 Sept and today has gone missing as has her address book.

Any ideas? both as to what has happened and how any of it may be retrieved.

Is there something nasty and new on the scene?

The machine is AMD Phenom with 4 gigs ram and a huge hard disk and is running WinXP SP3. AVG is running, up to date and did not report any issues in today's scan.

Thanks,

Rans6.....

[henry crun]

Can you access your ISP mailroom ? if so that is your first port of call to see if they are still there.

If you cannot access the mailroom, go to C drive, click on Qualcomm, then Eudora Mail, then in the list of sub files look for "In".
If that file shows empty, I have run out of ideas.

[BOAC]

Have you Googled today? ..................."eudora emails missing" perhaps.

[rans6andrew]

BOAC, thanks for the pointer, I didn't think to Google as Eudora has been stable for as long as we have had it, it has never caused concern before.

It transpires that Eudora has done some recent backups for us, on the 20 Dec and, earlier today, so I have restored to the 20 Dec state which gets her out of the major hole, work wise.

I note that the advise on one of the websites is to migrate away from Eudora. Eudora, themselves suggest keeping the inbox, Outbox and trashboxes all less than 1 MegaByte! Quite often the daily mail receipts can exceed 1 MegaByte, perhaps we need to get a different mail browser!

Thanks again,

Rans6....

[BOAC]

I think both OE and Outlook run to 2gb.

Two short-term solutions:

1) Use a programme like Mailwasher to filter out unwanted stuff before you download

2) Set filters to shove stuff into different mailboxes How to Use Eudora Mail Filters | eHow.com (http://www.ehow.com/how_2175796_use-eudora-mail-filters.html)
to keep the inbox size down.

Edit to add - I think the mention of maximum mailbox size '1 mb' is incorrect. A lot of single emails well exceed that! I suspect it is s typo for 'gb'.

[Mike-Bracknell]

Retrieving from the dim and distant murky past of my long term memory (used to admin 800 Eudora users), there were a couple of files that made up Eudora's mailbox database. An .MBX file and a .TOC file. The MBX is the mailbox and the TOC is the Table Of Contents. Sometimes Eudora would get it's knickers in a twist and corrupt it's TOC. Thankfully though, if you shut Eudora, delete the .TOC file and start Eudora it would rebuild the TOC for you.

Try that once you have a backup of the files though, as i'm talking info from 1994ish onwards :)