Re: OT: Mail archives

On 10/13/2024 1:13 PM, Carlos E.R. wrote:

On 2024-10-12 14:06, Don Y wrote:

Lawyer asked me to dig up some email correspondence from
~20 years back.  Of course, any MUA under windows -- in
that era -- likely stored mail in a proprietary format.
>
In my case, OE used dbx files which are tedious, at best,
to parse with a hex editor.  :<
>
<http://www.mitec.cz/mailview.html> seems to do the trick
(though the UI is a bit cumbersome).
>
I'll have to poke around their site to see if there are other
useful "goodies"...

 The best way to export/import mail from/to different mail clients, is:
    - the source mails need to be on a MUA that supports IMAP.
   - copy the mail to a folder on any IMAP server available (it can be local to you, not internet).
   - on destination machine, copy the mail from the imap server to wherever you want it.
 No need for translation or special import/export functions. Caveat: both originator and destinator softwares need to support IMAP, and you need an intermediate IMAP server.

What you need is something that can *read* the local archive of the messages
(given that the original mail account is often defunct so accessing the
messages on a server is not possible).  No use trying to connect to
an IMAP server unless you have an MUA that can process the local copy
of the archive!
If folks didn't create arbitrary file formats and, instead, stuck with
traditional formats, then one could write a script in a text editor to
just parse the *text* file as necessary.
Software vendors keep wanting to "improve upon" mechanisms
that already work -- injecting their own bugs and idiosyncracies
in the process.
Ventura Publisher used to have a delightful *text* (SGML-ish)
format.  So, if the application didn't have a feature you wanted
(e.g., replace all figure numbers with text of the form:
Figure <chapter>-<number>), you could implement it outside of
the application and then let the application re-parse the
file to incorporate your changes.
But, Corel decided to buy VP and "improve upon" this simple
representation (for negligible efficiency -- time *or* space -- gains)
and cut off these wonderful back doors that THEY wouldn't have time
to implement.  Solution:  stick with older versions.
As annoying as Adobe can be, one can usually access their
files with a text/hex editor and a bit of commonsense.
[E.g., I use Illustrator to "draw" the paths for the various
gestures that I recognize.  Then, open the .AI file and extract
the few lines of PostScript code that represent the essence of
the gesture and paste those into my "gesture database".  So,
*I* don't have to design a tool to build gestures, graphically,
but can rely on an existing tool to do so on my behalf!]