🚀 go-pugleaf

Piet van Oostrum <piet@cs.uu.nl> writes:

>>>>>> tyler <tyler.smith@mail.mcgill.ca> (T) wrote:
>
>>T> Hi,
>>T> I've just noticed that one of my mail files ~/Mail/lists, has close to
>>T> 300 emails in it, but only the first 178 are shown. 
>
>>T> I tried saving a new message to this file from my inbox using vm (using
>>T> s), and the message does get appended to the file, but when I open the
>>T> file from vm (using v), I still only see the first 178 messages. I also
>>T> deleted one of the 178 emails that are visible, which resulted in only
>>T> the first 177 messages being displayed. Please help!
>
>>T> VM = 8.0.11
>>T> GNU Emacs 23.0.60.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.12.10) of 2008-07-11
>
> I once had something similar. I opened the file as a regular file with
> C-x C-f (find-file), after closing the mailbox. I looked for the message
> following the last one that was properly displayed and found something
> fishy in the headers (probably the X-VM-v5-Data: stuff). After manually
> repairing it the whole mailbox was again visible. I think that you also
> can delete that whole header and VM will reconstruct it when you reopen
> the mailbox.

This is getting more disturbing. On reopening the file today, there are,
again, only 176 messages (I deleted another one as a test). Then I check
for how many messages are actually there: 

grep X-VM-v5-Data: ~/Mail/lists | wc
    176    1760    8984

So now, vm has deleted all the messages it wouldn't display yesterday. I
double-checked by checking my backup of the file (nearly a month old,
ouch), which had 229 messages (from the grep line), but only displayed
178. If vm is not only failing to display messages, but also deleting
them for some reason, I'm going to have to switch to something else
until I can figure this out.

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. 

Help!

Tyler

-- 
When in doubt, use brute force.
                                       --Ken Thompson