Emailchemy 9.8.4 was released on January 7 with better handling of Eudora for Mac email and the ability to recover deleted messages from Entourage Database files. This update is recommended for all users converting Eudora for Mac email.
The Eudora for Mac improvements focused around better handling of mailboxes with corrupt TOC (table of contents) data. Eudora for Mac still puts data (the TOC, namely, and some other info) in Mac OS resource forks – a special Mac-specific part of a file that was supposed to go away with Mac OS 9. Technically, Mac OS X is supposed to be backward compatible with resource forks, but you also have to consider that the last version of Eudora for Mac was released back in 2006 — about a year before Mac OS X 10.5 was released. There are many documented issues of Eudora for Mac not running well in Mac OS X 10.5, and most of these issues can be traced to the corruption of the mailbox resource fork.
When Emailchemy’s Eudora for Mac converter would hit a mailbox with a corrupted resource fork that contained TOC data, it would sometimes skip the entire mailbox thinking that the TOC was empty. As soon as this was discovered we logged it as a critical but and got it fixed right away. The workaround for affected end users was to change Emailchemy’s setting in the preferences to simply not use the TOC data for Eudora conversion, we also realized we had to make the converter smarter about when to use the TOC data, so now the converter is much more robust.
For recovering Entourage deleted messages, we created a new converter in the Advanced Conversion tool. We did this because the recovery scan can take quite long compared to doing a standard conversion, and this way the recovery scan will only be used if you explicitly want it.
When you delete a message in Entourage and then empty the Trash folder, the message is marked as deleted and removed from the database’s internal list of messages, but the message data is still there. The message data (the header, the message contents, and even attachments) will stay in your Database file until you tell Entourage to rebuild or compact the database. Emailchemy’s new Entourage Recovery converter knows how to find deleted messages, and it will attempt to rebuild the message from the data it can find.
Our test results show that the Emailchemy’s Entourage Recovery converter is able to recover 100% of all received messages that have been marked for deletion since the last time the Database file was rebuilt, but it is unable to recover sent messages. This limitation has to do with how sent messages are stored in fragments, and we may be able to come up with something to address them later. However, the converter now does recover the attachments from sent messages, and they will be written to blank email messages with the current date.
