Creating messages and mbox folders from plain text

Tom Hukins tom at eborcom.com
Mon Feb 13 12:58:52 PST 2012


On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 06:19:42PM +0000, Nick Morrott wrote:
> I have a bunch of old emails from med school stored as records in
> simple plain text files (edited ancient Eudora dumps, IIRC), with all
> but the most essential headers stripped out:

Hi, Nick.

I dealt with Eudora's mailbox format some time around 1998.  Eudora
didn't store messages in the conventional text-only mailbox format
using "From " as the delimiter at the start of the file.  Your example
suggests this as you only have the "From:" header field not the "From
" message delimeter.

As Eudora mailboxes contain no inline message delimeters, Eudora also
stored message offsets in a binary file which you could poke at with
pack() to pull out the messages in the mailbox.  Various people had
documented the format of the binary files on the Web, even back then.

This is all off the top of my head.  My memories may have become
confused over time.

Wikipedia has a good explanation of the mailbox format I describe
above:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_mailbox_format

Also you might like to look at Tie::Eudora on CPAN, although I don't
know how well it might work.

Finally, congratulations on keeping better backups than I do. :)

Tom


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