[neomutt-users] Where to find the most recent version of mb2md

[H]

On 04/05/2023 03:38 AM, Marius Gedminas wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 04, 2023 at 07:42:01PM -0400, H wrote:
>> I have quite a few Thunderbird mbox mailboxes to convert to Maildir
>> format and found mb2md on the 'net. Unfortunately I have not been able
>> to find the latest version as there seem to be quite a few versions
>> floating around without clear version labeling.
>>
>> I /believe/ the most recent version might be 18 but not sure where to
>> find it. The CentOS 7 EPEL version claims to be version 17 but I think
>> it might actually be version 4 or 5... This EPEL version fails to
>> correctly parse and extract many mail messages from the mbox file.
>>
>> Is anyone able to shed any light on where the most recent version
>> could be found?
> Unfortunately I'm not familiar with that script.
>
> Why don't you use NeoMutt itself to convert mailboxes to maildirs?
> It goes something like this: https://foolab.org/node/1737
>
> It's what I did a long time ago, but more manually.
>
> Marius Gedminas

Thank you for the link which I was not aware of.

By inspecting my INBOX files in an editor I found that most of them will need some manual (or semi-automated) fixing. Although these are thunderbird mailboxes, some have mail messages that in turn were imported, or converted, from another older email software.

I can see that in some of my INBOX files many mail messages do not begin with the ”X-Mozilla“ lines that specify that status of the message and many have no information following on the same line as the first "From“, not sure why.

My plan now looks as follows:

- Step 1. Determine how many messages there there are in each mbox folder by running this script:

awk '/^Return-Path/ {count++} END {print count}' mboxfolder

The assumption is that each message has exactly one such line and thus will tell me how many messages there are in the relevant message folders.

- Step 2. Modify the mbox folder file so that every message begins with a "From" line, regardless of what follows.

- Step 3. Modify one of the mb2md.pl scripts to be more flexible to find the date sent (or received) from another line in the message and also make sure the sender and subject will be visible by neomutt once converted to maildir format.

Right now, before any manual (or semi-automated) fixing, the mbox file converted by mb2md do not show all messages (see comment on "From" above) and many have an empty subject line and do not show the sender, this in neomutt, of course.

Once I fix the "From" issue above, I'll see how that affects subject and sender information visible in neomutt.

More work than I initially thought...