[ILUG] Converting mbox to maildir

[Kenn Humborg]

On Sun, Aug 01, 2004 at 11:56:05PM +0100, Niall O Broin wrote:
> I want to convert a bunch of mail from mbox to maildir. Mr. Google has lots to
> say about this, and what I'm thinking of using is mb2md.pl from
> http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md . It seems that it does the
> business, it has been around for a while and has been relatively recently
> updated. I'm just asking here in case any of you knowledgable people had any
> comments or experience with this or any other similar tool.

I did this about 3 years ago with, IIRC, a script called mbox2maildir.
I have a feeling it came with one of the non-sendmail MTAs or non-UW
IMAPDs.  Or maybe I just found it on the web.

It's available at http://www.bluetree.ie/~kenn/mbox2maildir.  No 
warranty, etc, especially considering it's marked as version 0.00 :-)

There was one snag, however, which I didn't notice until after I'd
converted everyone's mail.  CourierIMAP (and hence Maildir, I guess)
uses the modification timestamp on the individual message files to
provide the "Received" date to IMAP clients.  mbox2maildir left
each message file's timestamp as the time of the conversion.

I hacked a shell script to use date in the From_ header of each message
and touch(1) to change the time on each file.  And I don't have this
any more because it was a put together on the command line and 
it expired out of my .bash_history long ago.

I don't know if the timestamp-as-received-date is a Courier thing
or a Maildir thing.  But watch for this after you convert your
first mbox.

Later,
Kenn