Folder Conversion between Mozilla and UW Mailbox Standards
Recently I had the need to move my Email out of Mozilla folders into the
standard Unix Email format. To my surprise pine and imapd by the University
of Washington (UW) were not able to cope with Mozilla's folders and only
displayed some of the emails in these folders. Sometimes the whole folder
was considered to be a single email with an attachment of all the emails.
After long poking I found that the reason for this are the strict
requirements of the UW tools for the format of the "From - ..." line in Unix
email folders. This line marks the start of emails in a mailbox file.
The format of the from line is:
From - WWW MMM DD HH:MM:JJ [Timezone] YYYY
where:
| WWW | Weekday |
| MMM | Abbreviated name of month |
| DD | Day of month |
| HH:MM:JJ | Time |
| YYYY | Year |
Mozilla begins Emails that have a date in the first 9 days of a month with
only a single digit instead of two digits as expected by the tools of
the University of Washington. UW tools expect either 05 or " 5" and require
the format to be followed rigidly. The moz2imap tool changes the format so
that Email from Mozilla can then be properly processed by pine, imapd and
other tools of the University of Washington.
moz2imap is invoked with two parameters specifying the Mozilla folder
to be read and the new folder to be generated:
moz2imap Mozilla-folder new-folder
moz2imap is available in a simple .c source file here. It can be build with:
gcc -o moz2imap moz2imap.c
Change Log
November 14, 2003: Initial Release
Last update November 14, 2003,
Robert van Aven, robert[@]graphe.net.