[Alpine-info] bug reports

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, 7 May 2008, Guido Ostkamp wrote:


> Personally, I would like to stick with mbox, because it is the only 

> format that is fully supported by 3rd party tools like Perl's Mail::Box 

> and other Email clients, and there is no pure binary stuff in it (except 

> attachments) that can break things easily, e.g. make searching with grep 

> and other indexing tools etc. impossible.


Isn't MH another format with a lot of support?  I am not 100% sure on 
this, but I think MH is like mbox except that every message has its own 
file and the files are in a directory.  So instead of an mbox file named 
"saved-messages", say, that contains 2,000 messages concatenated together, 
you'd have a directory called "saved-messages" that held 2,000 separate 
files -- one file per message.

I found this perl script somewhere, but I'm not sure where.  Either it was 
called mbox2mh or that was the name I gave to it:


-------------begin perl script "mbox2mh" on next line------------------
# syntax:
#
# mbox2mh mbox_file

perl -e '$x = 0; while (<>) { if (m/^From /) { $x++; open(MAIL, "> $x"); }; print MAIL $_; }' $1
-------------end perl script "mbox2mn" on previous line----------------


I have used the script and it worked.  I just tested it again, as follows:

$ mkdir mh
$ cd mh
$ mbox2mh ~/mail/some_mbox

There were 148 messages in ~/mail/some_mbox so the mbox2mh command created 
149 files in the default directory.  The files were named 1, 2, ..., 149. 
The first file was Pine's "internal data" file.  I continued:

$ cat ? ?? ??? > mbox2
$ diff ~/mail/some_mbox ./mbox2

The files were not different.  That exercise showed that to recreate the 
mbox file from MH files all one need do is concatenate the MH files in the 
correct order.

Anyway, that's all I know about MH and it might be wrong!

Mike