[Info-vax] Recovering messages from a MAIL.MAI file?

[s.carter at ieee.org]

On Sunday, January 21, 2018 at 12:01:32 PM UTC-5, gwil... at cfa.harvard.edu wrote:
> I've been handed a zip file containing some MAIL*.MAI files
> from a colleague.  They came from a VMS system that was
> decommissioned some years back.  He has asked me to recover
> the messages.  The externally-stored messages are easy, the
> problem is the short messages stored within MAIL.MAI.
> 
> The zip file was not created with the -V flag ("save VMS
> attributes"), so the unzipped MAIL.MAI does not have the correct
> attributes.
> 
> By comparing to an active MAIL.MAI, I can use set file/attr
> to set RFM:VAR. ORG:IDX, MRS:2048, RAT:NONE and BKS:5.  But I
> see no way to set the prolog definition.
> 
> A working file:
> 
> MAIL.MAI;1                    File ID:  (668622,61,0)
> ...
> File organization:  Indexed, Prolog: 3, Using 2 keys
>                              In 3 areas
> 
> The unzipped file:
> 
> MAIL.MAI;1                    File ID:  (850295,86,0)
> ...
> File organization:  Indexed
> 
> A search (using various keywords) of comp.os.vms didn't find
> anything relevant.  Is it possible to modify as needed from the
> command line?
> 
> Gareth

Because you have a working mail.mai file, you can use analyze to get the complete file structure of a 'correct' mail.mai file:

$analyze /rms /fdl /output=mail.fdl mail.mai

If you need to, you can modify the mail.fdl file with edit /fdl to change or eliminate attributes that are interfering with a successful conversion.

$convert /fdl=mail.fdl (unzipped)mail.mai mail.mai

The mail.fdl file is just a text file so you can type it out if you want to see what it contains.

Steve