141: How do I recover my mail files after Rmail munges their format? If you have just done rmail-input on a file and you don't want to save it in Rmail's format (called BABYL), just kill the buffer (with C-x k). If you typed M-x rmail and it read some messages out of your inbox and you want to put them in a Unix mail file, use C-o on each message. If you want to convert an existing file from BABYL format to Unix mail format, use the command M-x unrmail: it will prompt you for the input and output file names.