A mailbox I imported to EagleFiler from Mail contains 3232 records.
I sorted the mailbox by Tag Names, highlighted the messages in each Tag Name group (noting the number of messages each contained) and exported the messages.
After importing the mailboxes to Mail, there is a total of only 3218 messages.
By comparing the mailboxes in Mail with the Tag Name group in EagleFiler, I can see some of the messages that are missing but don’t see anything suspicious, although of course maybe that’s because I don’t know what to look for.
(In case it matters, I had originally exported the mailbox using macOS 10.14.6 and am now running 10.15.3.)
Any idea why some messages shouldn’t be re-imported?
Just to be clear, this is the number shown in EagleFiler?
I’ve seen some cases where Mail gets confused and doesn’t properly detect the message boundaries when importing from a mbox file, so you could end up with two messages combined into one. It’s also possible that EagleFiler is somehow writing the exported file incorrectly. There’s no general answer—it depends on the particular messages.
Can you try to narrow down where the problem is, e.g. find the smallest export you can that imports as the wrong number of messages? Then you could either look at the file yourself and see which message is missing and if anything looks odd about it, or you could send me the mailbox file and I can do that.
Thanks for this info – I thought it might be something like that.
As I mentioned, when I look at the messages that are missing from the re-import I can’t see anything distinctive about them. Is there something special I should be looking for?
By the way, the number of records is the one shown in EagleFiler, but it’s actually 3233 instead of 3232, since it includes a note that EagleFiler apparently added when I imported the mailbox. (If I open the note, it displays all the messages in the mailbox – maybe the hierarchy of the mailbox is messed up?)
If you look at them in the exported file, there may be something odd with the boundary between the missing message and the previous one. Or with the first few lines of the missing message’s headers.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean here by “note.” EagleFiler notes aren’t counted as records; they only show up in the Info window attached to records.
I said “note” only because that’s what it’s called in the Tag Names column. When I hover over it, it’s a list of messages skipped during importing because they are duplicates.
I took two screenshots of the window (2.4 MB each) and can upload them if they will help.
P.S. I’m fine with your explanation of why some messages weren’t re-imported.
In any event I don’t intend to re-import on an ongoing basis – it was just this one mailbox I wanted to work with in Mail, and I now see it may be just as well to do that in EagleFiler.
It would probably be good to look into what’s happening with these particular messages. If either EagleFiler or Mail has a bug, or the messages being brought into EagleFiler are damaged, those are all things that would be good to act on sooner rather than later.
I can locate the missing messages but aside from two that look like duplicates, unfortunately I don’t see anything distinctive about the others one way or the other.
Is there an easy way to tell if they are damaged?
Thank you for offering to look at the file – I would be glad to send it to you (and trust your confidentiality) but I need to keep the messages private.
That’s a good point. It could be there is nothing wrong but that Mail is just hiding messages that it considers to be duplicates. This page tells how you can get Mail to show the duplicates for more accurate counting.