From d19eac8b472fe4204c991322e212c53cfe305091 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Robbie Harwood (frozencemetery)" Date: Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:45:54 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] Added information about mbox, gmane, and mailman format conversion. --- howto.mdwn | 25 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 25 insertions(+) diff --git a/howto.mdwn b/howto.mdwn index 0e75acc..6db2a5b 100644 --- a/howto.mdwn +++ b/howto.mdwn @@ -114,3 +114,28 @@ various "third party" notmuch utilities. At this point, one should run a sanity check on the tags, and if everything has merged correctly, the ~/.notmuch.bak directory is expendable, as is ~/out.nm. + +* **Dealing with mbox and other formats** + + notmuch by itself is unable to handle non-maildir mail archives. One tool + to solve this is called mb2md. Assuming an mbox in ~/test.mbox and ones + mail archives to be in ~/Mail, an invocation would look like + + $ mb2md -s ~/test.mbox -d ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname + + Note that specifying the paths for -s and -d is necessary. This will create + a new maildir in ~/Mail/mynewmaildirname from the mbox at ~/test.mbox. + + Often the formats are more convoluted, however. Many lists provide an + almost-but-not-quite-mbox format that mailman produces, as can be seen, for + example, [here](http://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/). These + files can be converted with some degree of success to mbox using the script + found + [here](http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/converting-mailman-gzipd-text-archive-files-to-proper-mbox-files), + and from mbox to maildir as above. + + However, many of these lists also have a gmane version, which, where it + exists, achieves far better results than dealing with the messy mailman + output. Using the instructions from [Gmane's + site](http://gmane.org/export.php), we can download an mbox file, which we + can then convert to maildir using mb2md or other utility. -- 2.43.0