On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 03:36, Jules Richardson wrote: > OK, I now have all my old emails imported into Evolution under Linux > from Outlook pst files... for the benefit of the archives, process as > follows: > > 1) Export from Outlook under Windows, yielding seperate files per > message. > > 2) Under Linux, for each message: > > Convert to Unix format (I used the dos2unix util, > but sed would do the job happily.)
This isn't required actually. > Process message header to strip excess whitespace between field > names and contents - evo (at least 1.2.2) really doesn't like tabs in > this position, and outport seems to use them for some messages but not > all. Huh? This shouldn't be an issue. > Process message header to convert long-format month names in the > 'sent' field to the short format (i.e. November --> Nov) otherwise evo > fails to recognise the months other than May and defaults to January for > everything :) > > Process message header to remove square brackets around email sender > address and replace with angle brackets (I really don't know why outport > insists on using square brackets - I don't think that's legal and not > evo's fault that it refuses to parse the sender without it being fixed) > > Process mail header to change 'Sent:' field to 'Date:', as evo seems > to only act on the Date field. Sent isn't a valid rfc822 field. Infact, it sounds like its totally in the wrong format anyway, it has to be an rfc822 date which is pretty explict (and doesn't include long month names). > Finally pipe message through the 'formail' utility to correctly > format any included headers in the message text and to generate the > correct initial 'From' line before the message header fields. This isn't really required either, you just need "From -" between messages for evolution. Though i guess its useful for more picky mailers. > 3) Concatenate relevant messages into a plain-text mbox file. > > 4) Create empty placeholder folders within evo for the various mbox > files I built up, quit evo, and overwrite the new zero-byte mbox files > which evo had created within its disk structure with my own populated > mbox files. When I next start evo it refreshes the relevant data > structures to reflect the new mbox contents automatically. > > > Notes: > > I could have greatly improved things by downloading the source to > outport and hacking that, only I didn't have a Windows C compiler handy > :-) > > Some of the old mail I have came from an old MS Exchange server, and the > headers in messages exported using outport don't contain proper email > addresses, but just peoples' names. The lack of [EMAIL PROTECTED] address > doesn't seem to bother evo, except that it seems to stick an extra space > at the start of such names when displaying the 'from' column in the GUI. > > I didn't write anything to cope with re-encoding attachments and adding > them to the mbox file because I didn't need to. If anyone needs to do > that, you're on your own :-) > > Piping message content through: > > sed -e 's/^From:[\t ]*\(.*\) \[\(.*\)\]$/From: \1 \<\2\>/' > > ... seems to happily cope with translating square brackets around email > addresses to angle brackets. > > Similarly, piping the message through: > > sed -e 's/^Sent:[\t ]*\([0-9][0-9]\) January/Sent: \1 Jan/' > > ... handles the month translation for Sent: fields (repeat for other > months, although there's probably a nifty way of doing it all in one sed > command) > > The relevant email header rfc is a bit vague about what stuff needs to > be a single space, what can be multiple spaces, and what can be > whitespace (i.e. tabs too), so I'm not sure if some of the problems I > had with stray tabs between header field names and data was actually a > bug in outport, or a bug in evo (in that it didn't cope with correctly > parsing them). > > Phew. Anyway, I now have several thousand messages spanning several > years all in one conveniant place (and better still, in a portable, open > and searchable format) so I'm happy... > > cheers > > Jules > _______________________________________________ > evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
