# Inbox corruption

## col

On rare occasion I get corrupt inboxes with some users....the 1st line of text is always this :

^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@

I am running sendmail with dovecot in mbox format. I can manually repair by remove the 1st few lines up to the 1st "From:" but I was wondering if there is a way to auto fix or stop them getting corrupt ?

----------

## nephros

It is very hard to tell.

Could you give more specific, even pedantic, information about how mail is handled, mangled and read on your system?

----------

## col

 *nephros wrote:*   

> It is very hard to tell.
> 
> Could you give more specific, even pedantic, information about how mail is handled, mangled and read on your system?

 

Well I do have a few milters....like clamav, spamassassin & a couple of others. Do you think I should disable all of these ?

Problem is it happens so infrequently it is going to be hard to tell if this fixes the problem.

----------

## nephros

The ^@^@^@^@^@^ lines hint to it that the mailboxes aren't created in 'standard' old-style mbox format but in mbx. Make sure all the programs dealing with mail are configured to use the same format.

There are several, mbox, mboxo, mbx, mix, maildir...

Also, a tool called mailutil can be used to convert between them.

HTH

----------

## col

would it be worth changing over to maildir ?

----------

## nephros

 *col wrote:*   

> would it be worth changing over to maildir ?

 

That is hard to answer. If all your software can handle it why not.

Personally I use maildir for MTA delivery (qmail) and mbx as a final MUA format (alpine) because for me it makes incremental backups easier (as it's a single file).

----------

