Re: Why does mutt sees Mailman mailboxes as empty?
On Sat, May 09, 2009 at 10:56:30AM +0200, M. Fioretti wrote:
> I've downloaded the gzipped montly archive of a mailing list (with
> closed archives, that's why I can't give the direct link) ran with
> mailman/pipermail. When I unzip the compressed mailbox, it looks fine
> with cat, more and similar pagers. If I run commands like "grep ^To'
> or 'grep ^Subject' on it, I see all the senders and subjects
> properly.
Can't speak to what you've actually downloaded, but "looks fine" isn't
necessarily synonymous with "in valid mbox format".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
> But if I open it with mutt -f mailbox_file, mutt says it's empty.
> What can the reason be, and how should I proceed to see the mailbox?
> different mutt settings, removing special characters from the mailbox
> (but which ones?)
Try running
formail -ds < downloaded_archive > new_archive
and see if that corrects the problem.
If it doesn't, I'd suggest there are additional issues that will require
manual correction. Email address munging where 'user@xxxxxxxxxxx' is
replaced with some variation of 'user at example.org' (to frustrate
automated address harvesting by spammers), is common enough, but there
could be other changes. The archives from one source may be very
different from those provided by another, so don't be surprised by what
you get.
A quick test here on my own system reveals that a missing or borked
'From ' line, will cause mutt to exit with a "... is not a mailbox"
error, but an otherwise valid mbox with munged email addresses will
cause mutt to report "There are no messages". If the latter is your
problem, then you're looking de-munging addresses.
Whatever changes you do make, it's probably a good idea to grep the
archive using a unique header name to get the total message count, and
then compare that against the count as reported by mutt.
--
George