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

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <8df65c3e-394c-47bd-8461-49526216bda0 at googlegroups.com>,
gwilliams at cfa.harvard.edu writes:

> 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.

My guess is not just that the attributes are wrong, but also that some
data, i.e. the index, is missing.  IIRC, short messages (up to 1 block?
4 blocks?) are stored in the MAIL.MAI file, together with the header
information, while for longer messages only the first block (4 blocks?)
with a pointer to the external file containing the rest of the message.
If (and I don't know) this pointer is in the file you have, perhaps you
could write a program to reconstruct a proper MAIL.MAI file.

(By the way, nice to see SOME VMS at CFA; say hello to Steve Willner for 
me!)