Re: convert thunderbird email?
On Sun, Sep 03, 2006 at 11:46:08PM -0400, Jean-Rene David wrote:
> * Ren'e Clerc [2006.08.30 09:15]:
> > IIRC Thunderbird uses the mbox format. Mutt
> > supports both mbox and Maildir, so why not use
> > mutt to perform the conversion?
>
> When I tried to open a Thunderbird mailbox with
> mutt, it failed. Investigating a little further, I
> found that mutt couldn't parse the timestamp
> generated by Thunderbird on the "From " message
> delimiter line.
>
> I'm not sure whether this is a bug or not, nor if
> it would be a bug in mutt or Thunderbird.
I can confirm this. Once upon a time I did the Outlook -> Thunderbird
-> mutt route and ended up scratching my head for hours trying to figure
out what it was that wasn't working properly, and taxing Renee's
patience (Hi Renee!) all the while who was gracious enough to try and
help me. Mutt insisted on reporting "no such mailbox" or something
along that line.
The problem was due to the envelope header, specifically the date
format, IIRC. The solution was simply to rewrite, for each message, the
'From ' line in its entirety to read:
From - Date
where Date is a valid date in a valid format. You can use any date
you'd like (I opted for the current date), but note that both of the
following formats are equally acceptable to mutt:
$ date
Mon Sep 4 02:09:01 PDT 2006
$ date -R
Mon, 04 Sep 2006 02:09:12 -0700
It's possible that some of the utilities suggested previously may figure
out what's what and deal with the Thunderbird file(s) correctly, but I
experienced no problems performing the changes directly using Perl.
Several gigabytes and a few minutes later, it was just a bad memory.
Congratulations on having gotten this far. I'll trust you won't be
going back.
--
George