[geeks] New email archiving help

[Phil Stracchino]

William Enestvedt wrote:
> I am hopeful that someone here can help me convert what I am told are
> Eudora mail files into web archives.
> 
>    A friend has all the postings from a valuable, long-lived (1993-2008)
> mailing list that got shut down by the provider. We are putting it all
> online, but we need to break everything into web-accessible archives by
> date, by thread, etc. Our first efforts, using MHonarc, are here:
>       http://ibiblio.org/wwii-buffalo
>    It looks to me like the markers between messages (i.e., 74 equals
> signs) got misread, as can be seen if you scroll down a few screens.
> 
>    I tried Eudora Rescue on Windows [OK, on XP Pro on Virtual Box on OS
> X] and it created a zero-byte file. The nice admins at our generous
> hosts Ibiblio.org tried MHonarc and it created the above linked mess.
> [Not blaming them at all, honest!] Next I tried MacMHonarc 2 with no
> betters results, then MHonArc-2-6.15-OSX and still got a mish-mash.
> 
>    I have a .txt file for each year. Is there a litmus test to see
> whether these really are Eudora files? Is there some other converter I
> should try? Mr.Bill suggested hypermail, but it's five years old at
> Freshmeat: yikes. Am I using a weirdo archive format that requires an
> intermediate conversion? (I tried to import them to OS X Thunderbird,
> but it won't do so. I can try again for a specific error, but ISTR the
> data files were grayed out from the Importer.)

Sounds like it may be a job for a custom converter/extractor tool in
Perl or something similar.


>    I appreciate everyone's time in reading this and anyone's time in
> helping. Many of the posts to the mailing list in question are from WWII
> veterans and historians who are no longer alive, and getting access to
> this informaiton would be valuable.

Such a shame when irreplaceable information like that is lost.  :(
Those events are pieces of history, and there will never be first-hand
accounts of them again.


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.