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[Geek] Any bored Perl mongers out there?
Jan. 8th, 2004 12:34 amI have a modest challenge.
I want to stop using Ameol, the CIX offline reader, for my email. It's getting a bit too basic for me these days.
I'd like to use OS X Mail.app but my Mac's dead and was too slow anyway. Next best thing is probably Mozilla Thunderbird.
But I want to take my email with me. I have an archive going back about 7 years, containing 100,000+ messages. I want to keep it.
So I need a way to export from Ameol to a standard format, like MBOX.
Now, if I export from Ameol to a CIX scratchpad, the messages appear in one honking great text file per mailbox, in standard MIME type format, with the delimiter that the first line of each message is something like
Memo #123456
... then all the standard headers, starting with
From:
Now, as I understand it, the MBox format, as used in Eudora, Netscape etc., is very similar to this, but just uses that "From:" line as the delimiter.
So in theory, all I need to do is move the "Memo:" line down one - or even simply remove it - so that the "From:" header is first, and bosh, there's a mail file I can import.
But the only language I know well enough to do this on the PC is QuickBasic, and it can't handle arbitrarily-large mail messages; it can only handle 64KB chunks.
However, from what I am told of Perl, this should be trivial.
Does that sound right? Have I missed anything screamingly obvious?
I want to stop using Ameol, the CIX offline reader, for my email. It's getting a bit too basic for me these days.
I'd like to use OS X Mail.app but my Mac's dead and was too slow anyway. Next best thing is probably Mozilla Thunderbird.
But I want to take my email with me. I have an archive going back about 7 years, containing 100,000+ messages. I want to keep it.
So I need a way to export from Ameol to a standard format, like MBOX.
Now, if I export from Ameol to a CIX scratchpad, the messages appear in one honking great text file per mailbox, in standard MIME type format, with the delimiter that the first line of each message is something like
Memo #123456
... then all the standard headers, starting with
From:
Now, as I understand it, the MBox format, as used in Eudora, Netscape etc., is very similar to this, but just uses that "From:" line as the delimiter.
So in theory, all I need to do is move the "Memo:" line down one - or even simply remove it - so that the "From:" header is first, and bosh, there's a mail file I can import.
But the only language I know well enough to do this on the PC is QuickBasic, and it can't handle arbitrarily-large mail messages; it can only handle 64KB chunks.
However, from what I am told of Perl, this should be trivial.
Does that sound right? Have I missed anything screamingly obvious?
