Re: Problems incorporating old mail

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Alberto Luaces <aluaces@udc.es> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen writes:
>
>> I'm having difficulty moving my old mail into gnus, however, in
>> particular saving Evolution mailboxes as mbox files and then importing
>> them into gnus. Some of the mailboxes have come in fine, others have a
>> peculiar error where a mailbox of several hundred messages will be read
>> as a nndoc group of six or seven messages: 400 messages will get crammed
>> into one "message", with a couple of stragglers left over.
>
> Just a couple of ideas:
>
> * What happens if you try to open those mbox files with say, mutt in
>   order to see if the Evolution exporter is to blame?
>   
>   mutt -f mbox

Mutt can open them perfectly, so I don't think it's a problem with the
exportation. In fact, Evolution stores its messages in mbox format to
begin with, and while I started out selecting all the messages in a
folder and doing "Save as", that just produced a mbox that was identical
to Evolution's own library.

It's something that happens sporadically, as I had the problem a while
ago, then at some point successfully incorporated by Inbox and Sent
folders, plus one or two user-created folders. Now I'm having the
problem again. I started emacs with the -Q option, so that it didn't
even load gnus.el, but it still wouldn't read the mbox files correctly.

What I seem to be seeing is that, for messages with a
multipart/alternative MIME type, gnus is showing me all the
alternative versions of the first message in the mbox file, and nothing
else (though the line-count for the "first message" is accurate for the
whole mbox, and that first message takes a bit longer to load, it's
definitely reading the whole file). I see the plain text version, an
html version, and another…? They differ only in things like URL
highlighting and quote markers.

I'm still pretty baffled, hopefully something in the above will make a
little sense!

Thanks again,
E



>
> * Maybe you don't need to export the mailboxes at all. For example, when
>   I was using Kmail, it stored the messages in maildir format by
>   default. Could it be the same for Evolution?