Totally anecdotal but just a month ago I opened a box from my last moving (ended 4 years ago...) and I found a CD-RW labeled "Backup 2001", which survived 5-6 relocations, even an international one.
Well, I put it into an USB DVD player I have aaaand, it starts spinning and spinning and spinning, and nothing shows up in Nautilus. Looking at dmesg I see a few I/O errors on the device.
Then, I try ddrescue [1], start extracting an image, leave it doing its work for a couple of hours and... magic! I have a perfectly mountable disk image!
I got to live again some >20 years old memories, pictures of younger me with my friends. stupid things you would save as a late nerd teen with access to the Internet and a ton of emails in Outlook Express format (guilty!) that I could not open yet. I guess the format is probably not super-hard to parse (most of the content is plain text actually) but since I'm here, if you know of something already existing to convert it to mbox/maildir it would be cool!
I got to live again some >20 years old memories, pictures of younger me with my friends. stupid things you would save as a late nerd teen with access to the Internet and a ton of emails in Outlook Express format (guilty!) that I could not open yet. I guess the format is probably not super-hard to parse (most of the content is plain text actually) but since I'm here, if you know of something already existing to convert it to mbox/maildir it would be cool!
[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/