PowerMail Salvage

[PMSalvage logo] PowerMail Salvage is a database recovery tool for users of PowerMail, an excellent e-mail client made by CTM Development for Mac OS X.

What and why is PowerMail Salvage

In August 2003, a major power failure took out electricity to much of Ontario and the eastern United States. When the power came back on a few days later it became apparent that my Mac must have been busy when it lost the juice, because my several-hundred-megabyte PowerMail message database appeared to be irreparably damaged. Despite several attempts to revive it using PowerMail's built-in recovery tools, the database was unusable and not recognized by PowerMail as valid at all. Worse, my last backup was several weeks out of date.

Losing thousands of e-mail messages was not an option, however, so I set out to learn what I could about PowerMail's internal storage format. Armed with a hex editor, pen and paper and a C compiler, I worked for about five days documenting patterns and structures in a known-good database while working alongside it in PowerMail itself. Miraculously, following a week of toil, I had a working utility with which I was able to recover 14566 of about 15200 messages present in the damaged database (which included all of those which were new since my backup).

Over the subsequent weeks and months, and aided with additional information from PowerMail's developers, I have further refined the tool into an easy-to-use application. PowerMail Salvage will reliably scour and extract as much recoverable data as possible from a damaged database, then allow you to export it to a PowerMail Exchange file which can be easily re-imported into a fresh profile.

I am pleased to be able to offer this tool to the PowerMail community for those who may sometime find themselves in a similar predicament as I did. Since PowerMail Salvage has taken dozens of hours to research and develop, it is being made available for a reasonable price in order to help recover costs associated with the time spent on development.

Download and purchase now

You may download the current version of PowerMail Salvage and determine its ability to find messages in your corrupted database. It will not allow you to save recovered message without a registration key.

Download PMSalvage.zip (approx. 108 KB)
Requires Mac OS X 10.2.8 or later.

Buy now via SWREG ($49 USD)
Your registration key will be e-mailed to you immediately.

Revision history

1.1.3 (01 Mar 2006): Messages can now be sorted based on their containing folder. Compatibility with current PowerMail version (5.2.3) is maintained.
1.1.2 (16 Jun 2005): Updated with support for PowerMail 5.1.x databases. Improved quality of recovery in some cases where message headers are unavailable (thanks Dave Kripal). Also, improved compatibility of output PM Exchange files containing lengthy base64-encoded data.
1.1.1 (20 Aug 2004): Message folder groupings are now preserved (though neither folder names nor nesting are recovered yet).
1.1 (01 Jun 2004): Updated with support for PowerMail 5.0 databases.
1.0.1 (23 Mar 2004): Fixed a bug which would cause a crash in situations where the last record in the database was not fully formed.
1.0 (12 Jan 2004): Initial release.

Acknowledgements

Many special thanks are due to Jérôme Seydoux at CTM Development for technical help and logistical support in the development and refining of this utility (not to mention the excellent e-mail client which precedes it).

In all, the development of this tool has been hugely rewarding, and utimately provides even greater confidence in using PowerMail as my mail client of choice.

Technical support and information

For more information or technical support, please contact Ben Kennedy at support@zygoat.ca. If PowerMail Salvage does not appear to work in your circumstances, detailed forensic analysis of your corrupt database and other services are also available on a consultancy basis. Please contact us to discuss.