Lost links to EUDORA attachments

There is nothing special in the name and I just cannot restore the links one by one considering the number of messages (119) and attachments in that folder. Restoring does not work anyway in the folder itself, and I have tried your suggestion to move all messages in another folder, still the same. Although I specifiy the proper original and it appears to be recorded as such, the link is still broken.

I have the feeling the problem may lie in the associated .toc file and the corrupted paths (volume) to the attachments that it possibly contains, solution being to reconstruct properly the .toc file in that respect, if it is possible.

Thanks for the suggestion.

That was my point. By creating a new folder and copying some messages into it, you would force Eudora to create a fresh .toc. And then link restoration should work. But you are saying it still does not.
Could the problem be in file system corruption? Run disk check just in case.
"chkdsk c: /F /V"

Diagnostic run did not report anything special.

As indicated in the original post, the problem is reproduced in a good folder by simply removing the .toc file hence forcing Eudora to reconstruct it.

In that situation, all messages in the reconstructed folder loose some of their attributes, the labels for instance, and all links to attachments are broken.

This may indicate that the problem actually lies in the .toc file itself, and that its automatic reconstruction does not work as far as attachments links are concerned. In fact, the problem could possibly come from such an automatic reconstruction made at some stage on that folder, although I do not remember if this ever happened on that particular folder.

The solution may be to manually read/correct/edit the .toc file content assuming a proper reader/editor exists for this format.

Can anyone help on this particular point ?

In my understanding .toc files (Table of Content) - are automatically generated files that Eudora created to speed up the process of opening a mailbox for viewing. They are created from from information that exists in .mbx files - therefore it does not contain any new information that does not exist in .mbx - and they can be safely deleted.
Plus, Eudora checks the timestamps for .mbx and corresponding .toc and if they don't match (ex. you've edited .toc manually) Eudora discards offending .toc and recreated it from scratch.
Your problem is more likely in a corrupted mailbox then in .toc.

I also heard that some versions of Eudora on Mac stored TOC information in resource forks and to remove those you need to open .mbx file in a simple text editor then save it as .txt file. This removes the resource fork, after that you simply rename .txt into .mbx.
Of course, do this only after backing up.

Two comments/questions :

- my Mac Eudora mail files do not show any extension like the .mbx you mention, but only the plain name I have given to the mailbox. Is that .mbx extension specific to Windows and invisible with Mac ?

- if .toc files do not contain information not present in .mbx files, I do not quite understand why a folder initially OK as far as message attributes and attachments links are concerned, ends-up being "damaged" in that respect by simply removing the .toc file and letting Eudora re-create it ?

While waiting for your answers, I am going to try and clean-up the mailbox file as you suggest.

Thanks for your help !

Sometimes the file extensions on OS X are hidden. To show them all do this:
Finder menu > Preferences > Advanced > "Show all filename extensions"

I don't really have the answer to your second question. Like I said it was just my understanding (and experience) how Eudora's .toc files worked. If you can, why don't you post .mbx and corresponding .toc files. But pick a mailbox as small as possible, containing 1 message with an attachment.

My Finder preference was already set to show all extensions, the .mbx extension still does not show-up.

As per your suggestion, I post one mailbox file named Trial whic contains only 3 messages, each with one attachment link, and the corresponding Trial.toc file.

Good luck !

PS: the system does not allow me to attach a .toc file, the extension type is rejected. For that reason, I have attached the Trial.toc file under the name Trial.txt

It seems that the actual path to an attachment is not stored in either of those files. Only a reference to - what I think is - a serial number, like this:
src="x-eudora-file:P7A5353CC
I believe there is a separate file in Eudora's folder that contains a map from those numbers to an actual path.

Your comment matches quite well what I think. Whether the map is in the .toc file or in an other, the solution would be to find a Eudora guru and/or a program able to read and possibly modify such file.

I assume you were able to read somehow the .toc file to conclude the map is not in it, and the other file seems invisible as I have checked all other files in the Eudora folder, none appears relevant.

Any way to start by making all possible files visible ?