server migration

[bsdcat]

I've finally migrated everything for my vanity domain, idempot.net, over to my own server. That includes a mail archive going back 5 years, which was the funnest part. I had to convert all the messages from not-completely-standard mbox to Maildir++, and I used perfect_maildir.pl for the bulk of the work. Unfortunately, there were plenty of lines

Comments

[inqueery]

Ya I've never regretted moving to Maildir format - mbox is rather long in the tooth if you keep e-mail obsessively! ;-D

(Although my migration method was using UW IMAPD to read mbox and then using, say Thunderbird, to "drag" the mailboxes to a Maildir compliant IMAP server (running Courier now Dovecot). Clunky but worked pretty well)

[bsdcat]

Well, I wasn't just migrating my mail. I provide email for other people too, so I had to do it server-side. Overall I'm pretty happy with perfect_maildir.pl, and I chalk up the rest to the fact that mbox has been 'improved' differently by different people. In this case, I think uw-imapd relies more on the Lines: header, or something, so the stray 'From ' lines can creep in without messing up the file (from uw-imapd's perspective). But then MIME comes in and it gets weird, so I just punted on making perfect_maildir.pl actually perfect. :-)

[scottw]

(it does strip the '>' where appropriate, so that mbox hack doesn't pollute your messages after conversion)

But what if there were an actual ">From" in the message (such as a crappy mailer that quotes with ">" rather than "> ", or an e-mail that was discussing this issue)?

They really should have picked a character that was less common in e-mail, and then used it as a general escape character that could represent itself by being doubled.

[bsdcat]

Well, this is another reason I don't trust mbox as a standard. You can solve that problem, but for what subset of mbox-reading MUAs?

[bsdcat]

After high school, I spent all my time on systems using non-mbox formats unaffected by the problem. Pitt and Carnegie Mellon use Cyrus for IMAP, which has its own Maildir-ish file format; CMU used (uses?) MMDF for mail delivery, which has the ^A^A^A^A syntax to separate messages; also, I was maintaining the CMU-specific versions of nmh, exmh, and MH-E for a while, which of course use the MH format.

Looking at it now, it almost seems like a joke how many mail storage formats I've used over the years, and how well I've avoided mbox (except for pair, unfortunately).