I’ve recently been sifting through many boxes of loose diskettes.  Any disks with personal information are being copied and then destroyed, while an

The Adventure of the Mysterious Mail Files | PCjs Machines

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2023-01-31 08:00:13

I’ve recently been sifting through many boxes of loose diskettes. Any disks with personal information are being copied and then destroyed, while any “commercial” disks are also being copied and then put in a box for resale or donation. Hopefully later this year, my house will finally be free of ancient disk clutter.

Anyway, last week, I came across a few 10-diskette boxes containing disks labelled “MAIL1.1”, “MAIL1.2”, etc. Not very illuminating. So I made copies of them all and then looked at their contents; here’s what was on the first couple of disks:

At last it was clear that these files were pieces of Microsoft Mail Files or MMFs, and while MAIL3.MMF had been small enough to fit on a single diskette, all the other MMF files had been chopped up into diskette-sized pieces, using some sort of “splitting” utility that I had probably written specifically to make my own email backups.

It was easy enough to recombine the pieces and recreate four presumably complete MMF files, but now the question was how to read them.

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