getting email back to text

[bjlockie]

I'm trying to backup my imap sent folder that is synced top my local disk.
I hoped I could just copy the file but in the process I did something:

The Sent folder was 3189370 bytes.
The first few lines were text:
From - Wed Nov 27 15:52:04 2019
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
From: Me <me>
To: Someone <someone>
CC: Someone else <someone_else>
Date: Fri, 01 Nov 2019 09:49:30 -0400
Message-ID: <16e273a6a10.279c.f9cd3d9e960cfc4133b665fb110c3364@domain>

to
4167 bytes and
From - Wed Nov 27 15:59:20 2019
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
AAAACAAAAAgAAAAAAAAAAA
...

I compressed the folder.
Is there anyway to get it back to text or should I just delete it and hope it downloads again?

[tanstaafl]

Unfortunately if you have a corrupt folder and compact it you'll probably lose some data forever. I've seen a few cases (pretty rare) where the entire contents of the folder was lost. If you want to try to recover it see if http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recover_messa ... upt_folder helps. However, I wouldn't bother.

This occurred in a copy of the mbox file. Why not just copy the original mbox file to the directory in "Local Folders" again? If that doesn't help, I suggest you create a new folder in "Local Folders", select all of the messages (Control-A) in your IMAP account's sent folder, and them copy them to the new folder in "Local Folders".

[tanstaafl]

https://glogg.bonnefon.org/ is useful for viewing really large mbox files if you want to look at the original mbox file without any risk of changing its contents. Its just a viewer, not a editor. It has no limit on the size of the file it can view because it doesn't try to load the entire contents into memory.