Re: [PLUG] Recovering 7 years of email

[Sean Finney <seanius@seanius.net>]

i think you can do this in three steps instead of four:

1 ) find all the mailboxes (this is really easy, actually):

cd /root-of-search
find . -type f -exec file {} \; | grep 'mail text$'

2 ) decide how you want to sort this mail (like initially from
	sender, or by the to field, or whatever), and set up a 
	.procmailrc

3 ) have procmail process each of the mboxes, one by one, 
	ideally backing them up first just in case.  here's a
	script that does it that's in the procmail(1) manpage

#!/bin/sh

ORGMAIL=/path/to/your/mbox

if cd $HOME &&
 test -s $ORGMAIL &&
 lockfile -r0 -l1024 .newmail.lock 2>/dev/null
then
 trap "rm -f .newmail.lock" 1 2 3 13 15
 umask 077
 lockfile -l1024 -ml
 cat $ORGMAIL >>.newmail &&
 cat /dev/null >$ORGMAIL
 lockfile -mu
 formail -s procmail <.newmail &&
 rm -f .newmail
 rm -f .newmail.lock
fi
exit 0

of course if you want to interactively go through all of this,
this might not cut it, but hope it can be of some use.

--sean

On Sun, Sep 29 2002 at 01:23:08PM -0400, zeek wrote:
> In recent thinking of (Open Source: my/Postgres)SQL abilities I realized
> this task might not be so difficult.
> 
> 1) A simple script to scan a mounted cdrom for mailboxes (uncompressed unix
> mbox, if it's a file and has ^From: more than once it's probably a mailbox).
> 2) Take certain elements of the mail header To: From: Date: and use that for
> indexing.
> 3) Feed it to the database
> 4) A PHP frontend to search/view/manipulate this database
> 
> 
> My question is then: It seems there would a large demand to search or browse
> years of personal email archives --there must be something out there. And
> yes, I have not looked yet... because typically the results are overwhelming
> and I'd rather get a poll of opinion.
> 
> Cheers,
> -zeek
> 
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