On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Joel Reicher wrote:
Joel (and Mark, et all),
Looks like I managed to get this beaten into submission, and I wanted to
thank everyone who put up with my late-night caffiene-induced prattling
and helped me out :)
As it turns out, there *was* a corrupt message in the mailbox, which I had
suspected, but once I got things split, (into Maildir with a tool called
2md, if it matters) and got my hands on a pine compatible with Maildir
(gotta love BSD ports), all was good.
Standard or not, one of the reasons I suggested MH is because you asked
for something that would "[s]plit them [your folders] down into their
component messages" which is what MH would do since its format is one
message per file.
One of the things that confused me was a quick google search for MH and
finding a whole lot of docs on "mh-formats" and special cases. Silly me,
I didn't realize that was a config file. I also didn't realize pine had
native support for the MH format. Duhr :)
The other reason is that it sounded like you might want to do some fairly
hefty processing, and MH is about the only mail "client" suitable for
batch processing of large numbers of messages, since the MH commands can
be used in arbitrary scripts.
Most of what I needed to do was easily enough done in pine (sort by size,
get rid of any messages over 5 megs, get rid of a bunch of mailer-daemon
messages, do a lot of aggregate housekeeping...which was more
manual-intervention than scripted.
I'm slowly investigating the use of alternative (non-mbox) file formats
system-wide, but support for them is sketchy unless I want to stay
"married" to c-client. MBX seems to have issues with NFS. Maildir is
just disgusting to me (other than as a reformatting tool in this case).
MIX, I hear good things about.
What does system-wide use have to do with your original request? I thought
you were only after a bit of one-off processing, and I would have
thought changing to MBX or MIX would be enough for you to do any of
the maintenance from pine that you say isn't possible with your
unix-format folder (assuming it is possible with these other formats).
Simply put: I'm becoming of the slow opinion that the unix format is
archaic and should be beaten with a stick.
OK, but that's not the question you asked in your original email, AFAICT.
Fair enough...it was just owing to the fact that I was blaming the
corruption issue on the format (which I'll never know if it was or was
not).
If I find a method that's
superior for me, it stands that it may also be superior for my userbase.
This I've decided to be largely untrue, btw. After all, how much of my
userbase uses pine :)
Even though I use MH, I wouldn't indiscriminately recommend it to
everyone else; it depends on what you do. It is often very suitable as
a *temporary* format for batch processing, however, which is what I
understood was the general direction of your original question.
However, this takes into consideration that I'd have to migrate EVERY
procmail recipe that currently handles delivery.
(...why procmail can't have the same smarts as c-client and just
auto-detect a mailbox format while delivering, grumble grumble. Why you
can't just tell procmail to use dmail for al delivery tasks, grumble
grumble...)
Why not just get procmail to pipe the messages to dmail? That's
the intended use, and I wouldn't have thought it's a big change to
any procmail recipe.
For right now, since I can't ever invision myself using IMAP, I'm sticking
with the status quo (unix)...although I may switch over to using a
different format for *my* SAVED messages (the whole "not NFS safe" thing
scares me about a few formats...but I may move over to using a Maildrop
(which was the term I was unclear on) for my INBOX (my experience will
remain unchanged, but in the event of a reboot things are likely to be a
bit more sane).
-Dan
--
"One...plus two...plus one...plus one."
-Tim Curry, Clue
--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie, Sysadmin, WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144 AIM: LarpGM
Site: http://www.gushi.org
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