[ale] mbox tricks

[Pope jonnyX]

On Jun 2, 2007 10:18 PM, Jim Popovitch <yahoo at jimpop.com> wrote:

> I've got some old emails in mbox format.  These were exports from
> Outlook, pulled into Thunderbird, then exported as mbox.  Unfortunately
> the, many years ago, Outlook export didn't sort them in date order.
> Does anybody know of a way to resort large mbox files into sequential
> date order?

Howdy,

I'm not an email guru, but I have been working with several email and digest archives recently, making them all mbox compliant so they can be imported/exported/manipulated in various ways with Thunderbird, Evolution, Eudora, MHonArc, Hypermail, etc.

The email clients will import the mbox & build an associated index; from there you can sort (within the client) by date, subject, user, etc. Same basic deal with the email to html archivers. Unless I'm mistaken, and please correct me if I am, sequential date order within the mbox file isn't necessary if this all you plan on doing with the mbox file(s).

If you need to resort the mbox file for other reasons, you may wish to try the following:

* The easiest method I can think of would be to import your mbox to your preferred email client. Once the index is built, copy all of the messages into another folder. The new mbox built by the email client should be in date-sorted order (based on the Date: header); YMMV depending on your email client's particular quirks.

* If that's not satisfactory, you may want to try converting the mbox to .eml files and then back to mbox again; see this url for basic mbx2eml and eml2mbx freeware:

http://home.arcor.de/luethje/prog/

Yeah, it's Windows CLI stuff (boo, hiss), but it does the job.

* Formail/Procmail filters. I'm still learning these, so seek help from an expert if you want to go this route.

Hope that helps.


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