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How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

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Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#21

Post by hollander »

warent wrote: post #14
thedanbob wrote: post #7

Does anyone know of a good Linux email client that isn’t crippled by show-stopping bugs of this sort? I used Mailspring for a while, which has a nice modern interface, but quit after discovering that my drafts were only saved locally, not on the server. This has been an open bug for at least two years. In the end I’ve always fallen back to Thunderbird as the least bad option.

Emulate macOS in a VM and download Spark ;) I recently discovered this email client and it completely revolutionized how I do email.

A 5GB limit, and the $6/month (?!?!) has a 10GB limit??????

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#22

Post by raheemm »

cranekam wrote: post #12

> Evolution [..] has a bad data loss bug. It sometimes deletes the email body text in the compose window after changing the signature [..] it has bitten me about twice a month for the last two years. and > I might have been able to partially recover the message from the Draft folder if I’d retained my cool and acted immediately. It had been overwritten by an empty message instead. I must look into versioning my email…

It reminds me that we humans are capable of going to great lengths to resist change, even when it creates shitty outcomes.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#23

Post by annoyingnoob »

cranekam wrote: post #12

> Evolution [..] has a bad data loss bug. It sometimes deletes the email body text in the compose window after changing the signature [..] it has bitten me about twice a month for the last two years. and > I might have been able to partially recover the message from the Draft folder if I’d retained my cool and acted immediately. It had been overwritten by an empty message instead. I must look into versioning my email…

Had the same thought. Did this person consider using different software? Why hurt yourself like that?

Its no wonder that it will never be the year of the Linux Desktop.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#24

Post by annoyingnoob »

therealmarv wrote: post #10

nano ftw. Modern web email clients have this since a long time and Gmail never crashed internally for me ;)

Something tells me that if you are bent on using FOSS and/or care about privacy then Gmail isn't going work.

Can't argue that there must be easier ways to handle email.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#26

Post by dr_zoidberg »

weinzierl wrote: post #15
dr_zoidberg wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scalpel, as good as it was back in its time, sadly has been stalled. Carrier and/or the folks in charge of The Sleuth Kit have taken it into their github repo[0] but there haven't been commits for ~7 years now. I did a thesis on file carving some 10 years ago, and scalpels ideas where very good back then. Photorec[1], however, has been the gold standard for a long time on (open source) file carving. It can handle tex…

Good to know! I always had ignored Photorec because I thought it is only for image formats. To add to your list of options there is also YARA when used with appropriate rules. I don't know how it stacks up against specialized tools though.

Photorec supports a crazy ammount of file types (about 400 I think, but since they keeep adding it may well be over). Fun thing: Diablo II savefiles (and other games!) are carve-able with Photorec.

And it can also handle fragmentation (though I haven't tested the later versions to see how strong that is).

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#27

Post by Joeri »

cranekam wrote: post #12

> Evolution [..] has a bad data loss bug. It sometimes deletes the email body text in the compose window after changing the signature [..] it has bitten me about twice a month for the last two years. and > I might have been able to partially recover the message from the Draft folder if I’d retained my cool and acted immediately. It had been overwritten by an empty message instead. I must look into versioning my email…

Maybe they have an exchange mailbox? If you want exchange support on linux with full syncing of mail, calendar and tasks there are two options I know of: evolution and hiri. And hiri is paid abandonware. I’ve set up both, both are not good. Lately I’ve been using outlook web access, which is still bad, just not as bad.

Really I guess I miss outlook for windows. There I’ve said it. Judge me if you will. Its search feature is broken, but everything else worked well.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#28

Post by d2wa »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #23
cranekam wrote: post #12

> Evolution [..] has a bad data loss bug. It sometimes deletes the email body text in the compose window after changing the signature [..] it has bitten me about twice a month for the last two years. and > I might have been able to partially recover the message from the Draft folder if I’d retained my cool and acted immediately. It had been overwritten by an empty message instead. I must look into versioning my email…

Had the same thought. Did this person consider using different software? Why hurt yourself like that? Its no wonder that it will never be the year of the Linux Desktop.

Person/author here. Yes, I have considered other email clients. Evolution is the least bad of the available options and still sees active development. Most other clients don’t support CardDAV or LDAP so I can’t sync my address book. An email client is mostly useless without the contact details of the people want to contact.

Newscommers to the email client market have all been proprietary subscription-based middleware instead of actual email clients. The market has been standing mostly still for the last 10 years.

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#29

Post by lucb1e »

lixtra wrote: post #3

Of course recoverin an email is an innocent disguise. The same approach works for recovering any secret information that people used on a computer that an attacker can access. Of course there are plenty of possibilities. But it’s eye opening to see them in action.

This reminded me I was still going to report this bug, but anyone else should feel free to do so before me: gpg-agent stores your password/-phrase in plain text in memory indefinitely. You can clear the cache with some command and they also expire after some time, and gpg-agent will pretend to have forgotten them and prompt you again for the password, but the memory that contains the password is not overwritten and you can still dump the process' memory and retrieve it. Email contents seem relatively benign by comparison...

Re: How I recovered a lost email from my email client’s memory

#30

Post by d2wa »

thulecitizen wrote: post #2

I misread this as: "I recovered a lost email from my client’s memory". It made me think of the Black Mirror episode 'Crocodile', and I was quite amazed. Then I saw 'email' client... haha

Author here. That was actually the working title up until two minutes before publishing.
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