Email geekery, EML vs. MBOX

29-Oct-2009

Y’know, just when you think there’s everything to know about email, something comes along and just floors you. This is one of those instances.

Okay so anybody that’s been reading up on what I’ve been doing geek-wise knows all about the importing of ancient emails (yet again) I’ve been doing. This makes me wonder if I have another backup hiding somewhere. I’m hoping so because I don’t have any of my ‘06 mails. You can thank Gmail for whacking those.. I hate Gmail. Seriously, I really, really hate that mail system. Whatever. Moving on.

Recently I’ve entertained the idea of switching back to Mozilla Thunderbird because I like that email client so much. However on attempt to import all my WL Mail EMLs over to MBOX with my super-secret (but not really) tools, there were several mails that absolutely would not convert properly to MBOX no matter what.

I was able to ferret out a few of these rogue emails that wouldn’t convert correctly and here’s what I’ve discovered.

Certain mails I received in the early 2000s were forwards of jokes. Everybody gets these from time to time. The way people used to do this only because they didn’t know any better was to forward an email as an attachment. This happened both in client and in webmail at the time. That forwarded attachment was sent to somebody who thought the joke mail was funny, so he or she also forwarded it as an attachment. And then two other people did the exact same thing.

By the time this mail gets to you, it’s a forwarded attachment of a forwarded attachment of a forwarded attachment of a forwarded attachment of a forwarded attachment. We’re talking five levels deep or more depending on how many times it was forwarded and reattached.

There is no EML-to-MBOX program that knows how to handle this. What happens is that yes, that EML upon conversion will write to an MBOX file but it won’t show up in Thunderbird at all.

The chances of the super-deep nesting of attachments doesn’t happen too much these days because webmail grew up and changed the forwarding process to inline instead of being attached. Mail clients also followed suit unless you specifically instruct it to do otherwise.

Here’s problem #1: I can’t switch to Thunderbird because of those multi-level-deep emails because the utilities I use (I have two) absolutely will not convert them properly. The only way I could get any of them to work is by manually dragging/dropping them into the client.

Ugh.

Here’s problem #2: Some of the mails upon import don’t carry over the origination date. What happens is that they’re a bunch are shown as “today” and not when they were originally received. The only way to fix that is to manually modify the date header – BY HAND.

If I’m determined enough, I could get this to work. But I don’t think it’s worth the hassle because we’re talking about 12,000+ mails here.

Ugh again.

**UPDATE** I found a way to do it. See next page.

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