"This Fair Gift"

[pameladean]

I had intended to title this entry "I am an Idiot," but I didn't think that would get the right kind of attention.

I recently got email from a college student studying my short story "This Fair Gift," including some questions about the way I arrived at the names of the characters. I decided to answer it after I'd woken up a bit, and then I got overenthusiastic about deleting read messages and I deleted it by mistake. If the person who sent that message is by any chance reading this, I am very sorry, and if you send me your email address I will try to answer the questions. I recall the questions quite well, but not at all the name of the sender.

Pamela

Comments

[daedala.livejournal.com]

Could the sysadmin recover it? I've never asked if that's possible, but who knows...

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

What emailer are you using? Eudora can recover deleted messages, as long as you didn't clean up the files. Appeal to Raphael for assistance.

B

[pameladean]

I'm using mutt. I had exited the program before I realized what I'd done, which makes me a bit dubious about recover. (Yeah, like I know anything about it.) I'll ask David first, but he's a bit busy at the moment, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to mention the matter here.

Pamela

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Look at the data file manually with a text editor. There's a chance the message is still there.

B

mutt and email recovery

[(Anonymous)]

If you're using normal unix mailbox files (rather than MH or IMAP) anything that's deleted when you exit is certainly gone.

The solution I use for this is to have the procmail receipe make a backup copy of everything, so that if I delete something from the main mailbox by mistake I can fish it out of the backup folder.

Hopefully, something like this may already apply.

[louisedunn.livejournal.com]

While your message is probably gone, the administrator of your mail server may be able to find the sender's email from the server's mail logs. If the message arrived recently enough that the logfile is still around, the server may have noted the sender's email address in the logfile (though the format of logfiles does vary across different mail server software; your logfiles may or may not keep track of senders' email addresses). And if you use a mail-filtering utility like procmail, that software may also keep a logfile that has sometimes-usable email addresses in it.