Importing mail archive into Thuderbird

[Cameron Simpson]

On 29Jul2014 20:07, Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com> wrote:
>>Where did you fetch them from?
>
>http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/arm-dev/
>
>>When form are they in?
>
>Good question.  It looks like mbox.

Ah, a mailman archive folder.

It is like mbox, but has obfusactions in it to reduce the risks of email 
address harvesting. (Personally I think this pointless, but it was all the rage 
once).

You need to:

   collate all the mail archives into a single file;
     fortunately you can just concatentate them, and UNIX comes with
     a command for that called "cat"

   if they're compressed, you can gunzip them (before or after,
     doesn't matter since you can concatenate gzipped files and ungzip the
     total if you like)

   undo the obfusation

Fortunately I have tools for this. I use this script:

   https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css/src/tip/bin/get-mailman-archive

to fetch and do it all, but it's not ready for others to use yet. Since I 
gather you have the files already, just:

   - decompress
   - concatenate

then pipe them through "fix-mail-dates --mbox" and "un-at-" into another file:

   fix-mail-dates --mbox <fetched-archive | un-at- >import-ready-archive

These two scripts are here:

   https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css/src/tip/bin/fix-mail-dates
   https://bitbucket.org/cameron_simpson/css/src/tip/bin/un-at-

Let me know how this goes for you.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au>