Some message bodies lost during export (>Mail AND >Entourageitself)

S

Steven Day

I decided to export some of my many saved messages into Mail so that I can
take advantage of Spotlight when Tiger comes out in the next few weeks. All
went smoothly but I noticed that not all of the message bodies exported.
These were originally on an IMAP account, which I suspect has something to
do with it. In any case, I tried transferring this mailbox to the POP
account and exporting. Same result. Drag to desktop, save as mbox; same
results. Restore from backup database; same result!

So, now it appears I lost a 1,000 messages or so. Any ideas. I already
deleted the original mailbox from the IMAP server, which was obviously a big
mistake. But I thought all had exported/imported properly.

Thought, too, it might be a Mail issue; but now Entourage has the same
issues as well.

Thanks in advance.

Steven
 
M

matt neuburg

Steven Day said:
I decided to export some of my many saved messages into Mail so that I can
take advantage of Spotlight when Tiger comes out in the next few weeks. All
went smoothly but I noticed that not all of the message bodies exported.
These were originally on an IMAP account, which I suspect has something to
do with it. In any case, I tried transferring this mailbox to the POP
account and exporting. Same result. Drag to desktop, save as mbox; same
results. Restore from backup database; same result!

So, now it appears I lost a 1,000 messages or so. Any ideas. I already
deleted the original mailbox from the IMAP server, which was obviously a big
mistake. But I thought all had exported/imported properly.

Thought, too, it might be a Mail issue; but now Entourage has the same
issues as well.
Click to expand...

So if this is a problem exporting into Mail and exporting into
Entourage, you must be exporting *from* some other program. What other
program? In other words, when you say "export some of my many saved
messages", where are you exporting from, and where are they saved and in
what form? m.
 
S

Steven Day

Sorry for the confusion. Basically, the export/import part worked fine. What
happened was the loss of message bodies (but not for all messages). No
third-party application was used. (Mail can import from Entourage directly;
or mboxes can be exported, then imported into Mail). After discovering some
of the messages did not include the body, I tried a few things with
Entourage itself (moving an IMAP folder to my POP account, in part, to
facilitate importing into Mail; using my backup database and importing an
mbox into my current identity). I'd just like to recover those 1,000 or so
message bodies. Bear in mind, the messages never disappeared; only the
content. Very strange.

Thanks.
 
M

matt neuburg

Steven Day said:
Sorry for the confusion. Basically, the export/import part worked fine. What
happened was the loss of message bodies (but not for all messages). No
third-party application was used. (Mail can import from Entourage directly;
or mboxes can be exported, then imported into Mail). After discovering some
of the messages did not include the body, I tried a few things with
Entourage itself (moving an IMAP folder to my POP account, in part, to
facilitate importing into Mail; using my backup database and importing an
mbox into my current identity). I'd just like to recover those 1,000 or so
message bodies. Bear in mind, the messages never disappeared; only the
content. Very strange.
Click to expand...

Okay, but you're not really answering my question. Am I to understand
that this happened with messages that you exported from Entourage? If
so, do you or do you not still have the original, exported, messages in
Entourage? If you do, we can try to figure out what is special about
them (why they export badly) and maybe get them to export correctly. If
not, the information is presumably gone. m.
 
S

Steven Day

Yes, I do have the originals saved in the backup database (which was my
final unsuccessful attempt to recover the message bodies).

Unfortunately, I did delete the IMAP folder (needed to save some space),
assuming that copying to the POP folders and having a backup in the database
would be safe. At this point, I suspect it won't be possible to recover the
actual message bodies. I was thinking it might be because when this folder
was originally on the IMAP server, only the headers were downloaded; but
that was not the case for all messages either. The more recent ones showed
up fine. It was older ones that were often message any message body.

At this point, I deleted about 1,400 messages that no longer had any body.
They can be recovered from my backup database, if you think that may help
discover some other problems.

Thanks.

Steven
 
M

matt neuburg

Steven Day said:
At this point, I suspect it won't be possible to recover the
actual message bodies
Click to expand...

Okay, so you do NOT have the originals, since the originals presumably
have message bodies. So I'm afraid there's no way to guess why the
bodies got lost. But it does sound like it has something to do with the
fact that these were IMAP messages. Sorry there's no more to be done at
this point (unless there's a backup of the IMAP server). m.
 
S

Steven Day

Thanks Matt. It's my own stupidity, in this case. I should have checked more
thoroughly if the message bodies had downloaded.

Now that I hear MBU is working on getting the Entourage database to work
with Spotlight, I may not need to export everything to Mail after all.

Best,

Steven
 
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