access mbx files?

[Donn Cave]

Quoth "David Isaac" <aisaac0 at verizon.net>:
| "Alan Isaac" <aisaac0 at verizon.net> wrote in message
| news:T9zVf.1942$b07.1558 at trnddc05...
|> Should I be able to access mail messages in Mahogany mail's mbx
|> format using the Python mailbox module? If so, can someone
|> please post a working example? If not, can you please
|> point me to documentation of the file format or better yet
|> Python code to parse it?
|
| OK, from what I have been able to learn (not a lot),
| my original question may boiled down to:
| has anyone wrapped the cclient library for Python?
...
| Will I need to pursue this, or is this functionality
| somewhere in the mailbox module.  (And if not,
| can someone please explain why not?)

In the end it depends on what you want to do.  But to simply read the
messages out of an MBX format folder, without necessarily accounting
for concurrent access from other applications, c-client is overkill.

If you look at the folder file - after the 4K header (2K? I forget),
the structure is <1-line-header><message>, and the header doesn't
carry a lot of information that's of supreme importance.  The one
thing you want to extract from it is the length field, which allows
you to index to the next header.  The message data is <CR><LF>.  As
far as I can recall, that's all there is to it.

I suppose it isn't supported by the mailbox module basically because
it isn't all that commonly encountered.  It may be more common on mail
servers, but there it's email net protocol data, POP or IMAP.  If
Mahogany has been using this format for `local' folders (i.e., via
filesystem), I think that may have been kind of poor judgement on the
part of its developers.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com