Re: Converting individual messages to mbox format

Hello Pat,

In our previous episode, Pat Barron said:
>
> I have a directory (actually, a few hundred directories....) containing a
> bunch of files. Each file contains a single e-mail message, in RFC822
> format. Can anyone point me to a utility to gather up all those files,
> and convert them to a single "mbox" format file, suitable for feeding into
> Hypermail?

If you're files are actually MH mailboxes, I have a Perl script that allows you to do just that. The script does many other things like splitting the archives into months (similar to the one found in archive/).

To be able to use it, you'll need to apply one patch to handle ietf-formatted mboxes to your hypermail. I haven't commited it to the CVS base because we're in feature freeze, but I'll do it as soon 2.0 is out (just a new option and the use of a pointer to skip one char while reading a file).

You can also make a script to concatenante all the files together in ietf-mbox format, then call hypermail on this huge file (which is what my script does, but after dividing the archive on periods).

Tell me if this is what you're looking for and I'll give you the URL.

> I do have to be able to preserve the message dates, so any solution
> must get the message date from the RFC822 "Date:" header, and put it into
> the mbox "From_" line.
>

You can patch my script to do so, but from experience the Date: header may not be consistent across messages (not the format, but the date value itself). The one I prefer to use is the date of reception of messages, which at least I know is the same and is always incremented sequentially.

-Jose Received on Thu 28 Oct 1999 08:28:21 PM GMT