🚀 go-pugleaf

"tyler" <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca> wrote in message
news:87zlf7urk0.fsf@blackbart.sedgenet...

> Ok, just noticed that the messages that don't display have something
> wrong with the line-endings - they all have '^M' at the ends of the
> lines. Prior to having this problem, I have never opened this file for
> direct editing, so somewhere along the line something switched encoding
> or something? Deleting these line-endings (carriage-return/linefeed
> thing) makes all the messages visible again.
>
> So where did the ^M come from? I don't notice it in other mailboxes
> created from vm.

Sorry that I am getting into this thread kind of late.

^M is the carriage return character (CR).  Windows text files use CR-LF to
denote the end of line whereas Unix files use just LF.  Emacs can deal with
both formats.  But if the two formats are intermixed within the *same* text
file (like a VM mail file), then Emacs doesn't know what to do with it.

Why does this happen?  Emacs and VM use a program called 'movemail' to
append new mail to an existing mail file.  This program is supposed to find
out what format the existing mail file is in and convert the new mail to the
same format before appending it.  There is some amount of guess work
involved in this and 'movemail' is not perfect in guessing.

You can clean up the file by deleting all the useless ^M characters.  Visit
the mail file as a text file and type something like M-x replace string RET
^Q^M RET RET.  Then save the file, kill the buffer, and revisit it in VM.

Cheers,
Uday