Hi. I'm migrating all my mail archive (some 60 GB) from Evolution (which is really a broken piece of software) into dovecot. Now I face the problem how to do this best...
Evolution (which is still a old 2.32.x version) itself uses mbox files, in a special hierarchical structure to allow subfolders and that like. It also stores it's own status info in X-Evolution and X-Evolution-Source mail headers. Unfortunately,... much of the mail was earlier from a Thunderbird installation, which uses it's own status headers (X-Mozilla*) that were not recognised by Evolution. I have no idea which mbox subformat was always used throughout the different programs and versions... 1) Any way to check for that? To make things worse... Thunder(burden) seems to have used a modified From_ line syntax... "^From -<address> <date>$" Ideally I'd like migrate all mail into dovecot (for storage reasons again, mbox) retaining the different status flags (read, forwarded, etc.) and getting rid of the proprietary headers (of course only when they were. First thing I tried was to simply copy mail within Evolution (i.e. dragging&dropping it from the local folders to the IMAP folders from dovecot). - that preserves the status from Evolution, but doesn't restore that from Thunderbird - it clutters up the information of all From_ lines... "<address> <date>" becomes "<address of my default evolution account> <now>" - neither does it handle the special Thunderbird From_ lines - neither does it remove the Thunderbird or the X-Evolution-Source headers - if Evolution has already had corrupted index files (and this is extremely likely... as it happens even immediately during recreating all of them)... so I may loose mail So my idea was that I need a program that: - can parse all the different mbox formats (those that use the quoted ">From" style and those that use Conent-Length) - can differentiate message headers from body (so that I can drop the proprietary headers and replace them by what dovecot uses as headers) - must of course understand multiline message headers 2) Any idea for a tool like that? The meaning of the X-Evolution and X-Mozilla* headers are easy to find on the web.... so I can convert them. So I basically "just" need a tool that parses all kinds of mbox formats... allow me to drop/add headers... and spits out the rest unmodified. 3) dovecot uses some special headers like X-UID and X-IMAPD... will it create these on it's own, the first time it processes the new mbox file? I mean these headers won't be there after creation. 4) Should I drop out (during) conversion... any other mail headers.. that dovecot uses as it's own? Thanks, Chris.
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