[Mailman-Users] Archive merge and search

[Hal]

On 10/11/2014 09:30, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Barry S. Finkel writes:
>   > On 11/9/2014 8:37 PM, Hal wrote:
>
>   > > I did some more research and found out that the MBOX format isn't
>   > > standardized as there are 4 different variations

> Jamie Zawinski's page http://www.jwz.org/doc/content-length.html has
> some historical information not on that page, and is far more
> entertaining (well, to warped minds like mine, anyway).

Oh my what a mess! Funny read though ;-)
I'm not surprised I've been having problems. That in addition to corrupt 
messages, missing subjects, having been through multiple systems and 
apparently being a mix of several MBOX formats.
Well, having finally completed importing all those MBOX files into 
Mailman I hope I never have to do it again.

I used the Thunderbird email program to organize them while 
simultaneously editing problematic MBOX documents in a text editor.


>   > > Investigating the MBOX files in a text editor I found the problematic
>   > > ones to have headers starting with ">From " (without the quotes) which
>   > > the working ones didn't, so I removed all those lines
>
> I'm surprised that this works.  What should work is to remove the ">"
> from From_ delimiter lines.

Failing to remove them resulted in every message appearing in the 
current month and without a subject. Using the Grep command in my text 
editor to remove those lines put them where they should be (correct 
dates) and with their subject headers.
I also realized that I had to rename all occurances of lines in the body 
starting with "From" to "from" or else those messages would get all 
messed up (not showing their body contents at all or only partly showing).


>   > When I read a message that has "From " changed to ">From " (at the
>   > beginning of a line), I have to trouble interpreting the mail.
>   > The URL above says that the transformation "corrupts" mailboxes.
>   > I would use the term "changes", as the e-mail body has been
>   > changed.
>
> See Jamie's page for why "corrupt" (in quotes) is of appropriate
> severity.  In particular, the example of a digital signature is
> salient.

I didn't try it, but I could probably have renamed all lines in the body 
from "From" to ">From". Oh well, at least it works now.

Thanks for the insight from you and others and especially for Mark 
Sapiro's help and patience on the subject!


Hal