I am trying to write a utility to remove empty maildir mailboxes. It
sounds like this should be very simple but it's proving really
difficult.
I'm doing this on a Fedora 7 system with python 2.5.
The first question is how to detect whether a directory is a maildir
mailbox. The following code snippet *never* says that a directory is
not a maildir:-
try:
x = mailbox.Maildir(dirpath, None, False)
except:
print dirpath, "is not a maildir"
The "x = mailbox.Maildir(dirpath, None, False)" always succeeds even
when dirpath is most definitely *not* a maildir (i.e. it doesn't have
cur, new and tmp sub-directories). It's only when you try calling a
method of x that an exception results.
The second question is how to manage a hierarchy of directories with
maildirs in them. For example I have:-
Mail
Mail/bcs
Mail/ben
Mail/cg
Mail/spam
Mail/usenet
Where bcs ben cg spam usenet are maildir mailboxes, I can't get
python's mailbox.Maildir to do anything useful with them at all.
My test program currently is:-
#!/usr/bin/python
#
#
# Remove empty maildir mailboxes
#
import mailbox
import os.path
import sys
def checkDir(dummy, dirpath, filelist):
print "Directory is ", dirpath
try:
x = mailbox.Maildir(dirpath, None, False).list_folders()
except:
print dirpath, "is not a maildir"
return
for msg in x:
print msg
for d in sys.argv[1:]:
if os.path.isdir(d):
os.path.walk(d, checkDir, None)
It would seem that the list_folders() method only works with the
Courier style maildirs where the diretory name of the maildir starts
with a dot. Is there *any* way I can get python to access maildirs
which are not named using this (IMHO stupid) convention?
I know my test program is far from complete but I can't get it to do
anything sensible at present.
--
Chris Green
--
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