the email project

In a further effort to consolidate and preserve data, I've made a start with getting all my past email imported into Evolution (from whence I shall more easily be able to propagate it in future). The email of the past dozen or more years is scattered on several CDs which I've tracked down, and in several formats. With the help of readpst, libdbx, and msgconvert I've managed to read most of it in. What remains is a singular .pst file that won't read for some reason, the current stuff I have at work, and the very old stuff (1994-1997) that is in text files exported from Pegasus Mail and Pine. Perhaps I can figure out some way to process the text files.

3 comments

  1. I was about to comment about how I couldn't get the package OLE-Storage-Lite to download from CPAN, until trying to dig up the exact error message just now, finding it wasn't in the repository, googling it, and learning it was a debian package. I thought it had been a missing Perl package. I installed it via Synaptic, and msgconvert.pl works for me now.

    However, I don't believe my files are true MSG format files now. $ perl msgconvert.pl 00000104.MSG yields the following:

    00000104.MSG must be an OLE file at msgconvert.pl line 732.

    They all do that. I'm thinking Microsoft's MSG format might be binary. Mine are just text dumps, from The Bat!, with headers and body shown as you would when sending the information to a human, and attachments in base-64 at the bottom. You wouldn't happen to know of something that could tell me the type of format my messages are in, would you?

    It would be nice to have a converter that let you either explain your format, and had a symbol for about every known format, or that could auto-detect the data, or one which you filled with your data, and at the end, did something akin to a flush to wipe the fields, and write out the converted message in your chosen output format.

    Then you could open a conversion object, push each field in as you parsed it, or based on a script which you pre-formatted to know what was on each line, and what marked the body, and attachments, and then at the end, you closed it all up with a conversion.

    (http://livejournal.com/users/greatbiggary)

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.