Author Topic: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey  (Read 8044 times)

Per E. Johannessen

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Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« on: August 19, 2020, 05:00:12 pm »
When booting AOS today I got the message "The program pointed to by the SET RUNWORKPLACE= line in config.sys could not be started".
I then replaced os2.ini and os2sys.ini with recent backed up versions and the system boots fine and all seems intact except e-mail folders which I have on a JFS partition.

Started SeaMonkey mail and it showed only 3 of 7 mail accounts, but there are no mails in any of them, also the subfolders are not displayed. In each accounts folder there are only four files; Inbox, Inbox.msf, Trash, and Trash.mfs, and they all seem to have been recreated today by SeaMonkey.
All other folders and files on this JFS partition are OK.

Before restoring mail from a back up I'd like to try to recover the files. (The back up is unfortunately a couple of weeks old.)

So far I've only tried JUne and it does not find the missing files. JRescuer seems to be for JFS volumes which are "unavailable" so I have not tried it.

Ideas anyone?

Dave Yeo

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Re: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« Reply #1 on: August 19, 2020, 05:47:08 pm »
Have you actually looked in your profile to see if the mbox files are still there? They should be somewhere under Mail, perhaps under Local Folders with the name of the folder.
If you're lucky, SM just lost track of them and they can be saved. I'd suggest first making a copy of your profile and then looking for the missing files. Sometimes it is just prefs.js that got damaged and restoring that from your backup will restore stuff. Other times it is the msf files got broken, they can be rebuilt but you may need to recreate the folder, shut down SM, copy the mbox file over new one, restart SM and click on the mail folder, open the properties, and click fix folder or such.
Frequent backups are a good idea, even keeping a couple of backups on your hard drive as often something like you experienced happens. I've had prefs.js get zeroed out, and profiles.ini likewise get zeroed out. Both very easy to restore.

Per E. Johannessen

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Re: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« Reply #2 on: August 19, 2020, 06:54:31 pm »
Yes I have checked the profiles folder and now I noticed that more folders/files are missing:
in \profiles\fakename.xyz\ there is only one folder named MAIL which contains 3 subfolders, one for each mail account, and each of them only contains the files I mentioned before, (the empty files created today; Inbox, Inbox.msf, Trash and Trash.mfs).

Just discovered another thing; tried to start OpenOffice Calc and it now starts with presenting the "Welcome to OpenOffice" like it does after a fresh installation. The OO package is installed on the same partition as the SeaMonkey mail stuff. I was using OO Calc a lot yesterday and at one point I had to restart it due to some calculation functions stopped working and after restarting it all worked again. As far as I can see all OO directories/files are where they should be. Other programs on this partition work fine.

Pete

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Re: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« Reply #3 on: August 19, 2020, 07:05:17 pm »
Hi Per

Might be worth taking a look at the drive using DFSee - www.dfsee.com - to see if that can recover missing files.


Regards

Pete

Per E. Johannessen

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Re: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2020, 07:30:41 pm »
I've already used DFSee but only to check for errors and it did not find any.
Looks like I have to read the manual before using any of DFSee's recovery tools......

ivan

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Re: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2020, 08:22:00 pm »
Hi Per,

A couple of questions. 1) What are the SMART tests saying about the drive?  2) Have you run chkdsk <drive> /f against the partition?

I ask those questions because the last time I had problems like that it turned out to be a drive with a flaky surface - the drive finally gave up as I was copying data from it.

Per E. Johannessen

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Re: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2020, 09:04:59 pm »
Have to investigate about SMART, but chkdsk, with or without /f, does not report any issues.
(The SSD drive was new in january this year.)

Dave Yeo

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Re: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« Reply #7 on: August 20, 2020, 01:55:27 am »
For SMART, to start, run smartctl -h at a cmd prompt. Also might want to check if your SSD has any utilities to check its function available and whether you can use them. Just because it is only a few months old doesn't mean it won't fail. For HD's, they usually fail in the first year or last years, likely similar for SSD's.

Pete

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Re: Mail disappeared SeaMonkey
« Reply #8 on: August 20, 2020, 03:02:27 am »
Hi Per

PMsmartctl - https://www.os2world.com/forum/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=2402.0;attach=6202 - is a fairly simple frontend to smartctl.exe that you may want to try.

I mentioned DFSee in an earlier response as it has a file browser and recovery option that has worked for me in the past.


Regards

Pete