Hi
all,
I wanted to share
my tale of converting email from MS-Outlook into a Mhonarc archive, in hopes
that it may be useful to someone else. (As I found out, being a Windows-based
user can have its drawbacks.)
My situation was
one of running a Listserv list hosted by Lsoft, and after several months
realizing that it would nice to have Google-searchable web-based archives.
Mhonarc seemed like a great product, but the months of emails I had
acquired were in Outlook 2000, which uses a proprietary format, not the
"mbox" format desired by Mhonarc. Likewise, Listserv archives are not in mbox
format. (The logfiles can be converted, apparently, but by default, the
logfiles do not have full header information, and on top of that, require one to
write their own conversion program.)
After some online
searching and experimenting, I was unable to find any non-commercial utility to
convert Outlook email files directly into mbox format. (They only seemed to
exist for Outlook Express -> mbox, such as
DbxConv.)
I found
that Mozilla Thunderbird (build 0.4) used an mbox format email file, and it
allowed one to directly import existing email from Outlook or Outlook
Express. Woot!
However, I was
disappointed to find that while the imported email from Outlook retained its
full header information, it lost any of its HTML formatting in the message
bodies.
A little more
experimenting showed me that if I imported email from Outlook to Outlook
Express, I could then import from Outlook Express to Thunderbird and it would
retain all the HTML formatting in the emails. But, apparently in the Outlook to
OE step, much of the header information was lost, such that Mhonarc could
perform no message threading, aside from matching the
Subject.
So, both
import methods had something the other didn't.
I then devised a
nefarious kludge to combine the best of both worlds:
1) Import from the
Outlook 2000 into Thunderbird, using Thunderbirds import
utility.
2) Import from
Outlook 2000 to Outlook Express using OE's import utility.
3) Import from OE
to Thunderbird into another folder, using Thunderbirds import
utility.
4) Create two
separate Mhonarc archives using the two mbox files from the two imports
into Thunderbird.
The OE archive
would have all the HTML formatting in the msg files, but the thread index files
would not be correct. So, I simply copied the date, thread and author index
files from the Outlook2000 archive over the ones in the OE archive.
That resulted in archives that retained both 1) complete HTML
formatting and 2) full threading information. Viola!
Subsequent to that
initial transition, I have been receiving all new emails directly into
Thunderbird, and '-add'ing those emails in batches to the existing
archives. (Again, being Windows-based and not having direct access to mbox files
on my hosted website, I have to do this on my PC, and then use Frontpage to
shuttle the changed files to my web host.)
Perhaps someone
will tell me there is a much easier way, but at least this worked and might be useful to someone
else.
My archives
are at: http://www.panmere.com/rosen/mhout/maillist.html
Mozilla
Thiunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/
DbxConv: http://people.freenet.de/ukrebs/
Regards,
Tim
