Re: [PLUG] Recovering 7 years of email

["William H. Magill" <magill@mcgillsociety.org>]

On Monday, September 30, 2002, at 12:57  PM, Bob Schwier wrote:
> Yeah, one problem with our glorious information age is that few have
> attempted to suitably archieve it.
> A reasonably publicized source with a good index would help a lot of
> people, particularily those with legacy equipment.
> bs
> On Sun, 29 Sep 2002, zeek wrote:
> > I have years of email backups on a sundry of cdrom, floppy, and 
> > numerous
> > sub-sub-sub directories that I'd like to somehow organize. For years 
> > I've
> > viewed the task as too herculean or complicated that I quickly 
> > figured only
> > a commercial solution would be availble, something to gladly accept my
> > numerous mailboxes and transfer them to a propreitary format which 
> > could
> > then only be viewed if EUL was accepted and paid for.
> >
> > 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.

Actually, the MH format, where each message is an individual file is 
much easier to deal with.

Just convert your mbox (or RMAIL) files with MH and then stick the 
resuts on a Mac and let Sherlock index them for you. You can then do 
full text searching on them, and the results will be returned as 
individual files, rather than a single file that must be parsed.

Then of course, there are those of us who simply use grep.

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
magill@mcgillsociety.org
magill@acm.org

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