[VM] visiting Thunderbird mailboxes

[Salome Södergran]

Hi!

I've just encountered a new problem:

When I try to visit one of my former thunderbird-mailboxes in vm
(with vm-visit-folder) I get the following warning:

"Warning: garbage found at end of folder,
/PATH/TO/MAILBOX, starting at 1 No messages."

and no messages are displayed. What does this mean and is there anything
that can be done?
With some of my TB-mailboxes there is no problem, with others I get this
warning. And with again others, only a minority of the messages are displayed,
others not, but no warning displayed.
I can't see what's wrong with the mailbox in question. When I open it in
text-mode, there is nothing akward about it, and the messages are properly
separated from each other. I even deleted the last few messages (as the
warning said "at end of folder") but with no success.

The switch from TB to VM would be somewhat more comfortable if I could
easily and reliably visit the former TB-mailboxes. But I've already come
too much to appreciate VM, so if there should be no solution I'd try to
make the best of the situation. :-)

Salome

[Uday Reddy]

Post by Salome Södergran
Hi!
When I try to visit one of my former thunderbird-mailboxes in vm
"Warning: garbage found at end of folder,
/PATH/TO/MAILBOX, starting at 1 No messages."
and no messages are displayed. What does this mean and is there anything
that can be done?

The message means that VM wasn't able to parse the mail folder. Sinte
no messages were recognized, the problems are likely to be at the
beginning. For instance, is there a blank line at the beginning? Are
there inconsistent line-ending modes used?

Please copy the folder into some temporary space, visit it as a text
file, and see if you can edit something to make it acceptable to VM.
(Note that you can use `M-x vm-mode' to parse a buffer as a VM folder.
However, this is not reversible. You have to revisit the file to edit
it a second a time.)

If you can't find the problem, send a bug report using
vm-submit-bug-report and attach a hopefully small thunderbird mailbox
that causes the problem.

Cheers,
Uday

[Salome Södergran]

Post by Uday Reddy
The message means that VM wasn't able to parse the mail folder. Sinte
no messages were recognized, the problems are likely to be at the
beginning. For instance, is there a blank line at the beginning? Are
there inconsistent line-ending modes used?
Please copy the folder into some temporary space, visit it as a text
file, and see if you can edit something to make it acceptable to VM.

The inconsistent line-ending modes caused the problem -- thank you,
Uday, for the hint! By replacing all ^M with ^J everything's fine now.

[Uday Reddy]

Post by Salome Södergran
The inconsistent line-ending modes caused the problem -- thank you,
Uday, for the hint! By replacing all ^M with ^J everything's fine now.

Great, it was a shot in the dark...

But note that the occurrences of ^M should be simply deleted. If you
replace it with ^J, you will probably end up with two new-line
characters. But you have probably figured that out by now.

Cheers,
Uday