TB - Sort add-on

[Cameron Simpson]

On 05Jul2015 21:50, patrick o'callaghan <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
>On Sun, 2015-07-05 at 12:30 -0600, jd1008 wrote:
>> Too tedious 'cause there are over 100K emails :)
>
>Take a look at formail, part of the procmail package. It might be able
>to do what you want, or at least be part of the solution.

I suspect not because it only considers one message at a time.

He basicly needs to take his messages and append them to a new inbox in date 
order. He can either write a small program to suck messages into memory, sort 
them, then write them out, or find a mail client which will let him sort the 
view by date, tag/mark all the messages, then feed them all _in_view_order_ to 
a fresh folder/mbox/mail-filing program.

He sould at first cut try that in TB, since that's what he's using:

  - view by date
  - _copy_ all messages to new folder
  - quit TB and examine the new folder to see what physical order it has

The catch of course is that one can easily imagine a mail reader choosing to do 
that copy in the present physical order for I/O efficiency reasons because the 
mail recent author takes the view that the end user can always view the 
messages in any order they like. So this approach may need to be tried in 
various mail readers until one is found that acts in the view order.

Or one can write a program, where one has complete control. But if you can get 
a mail client to do it then that will probably be faster.

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