Problems incorporating old mail

Problems incorporating old mail

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Hello,

I've more or less moved my entire email/contacts setup into gnus/bbdb,
and am loving it -- everything seems to work as expected.

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. The
mega-message displays as only the first of the incorporated messages,
with the rest of them I think interpreted as some sort of MIME part. The
stragglers, in many cases, are repeat copies of the offending message,
some as standalone messages, some with (1 part) in the mode line (but
displaying identical contents).

I've looked at the mbox files and the only thing that stands out is that
the offending messages (the ones that slurp up all the others) all have
MIME types of multipart/alternative. I have no idea if that's
significant, but there is it. I tried setting
gnus-mime-display-multipart-alternative-as-mixed to true, on the
offchance that that might do something, but no dice.

Can anyone recommend a solution to this? I realize that
multipart/alternative might be a red herring (though it seems likely to be
related to MIME somehow), and would be happy to provide any other
information that might be helpful…

Thanks very much!
Eric

Re: Problems incorporating old mail

[Alberto Luaces]

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

* 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?

-- 
Alberto

Re: Problems incorporating old mail

[Eric Abrahamsen]

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?

Re: Problems incorporating old mail

[Alberto Luaces]

Eric Abrahamsen writes:

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

Sorry, the only thing that I can think of, as you say that Evolution
stores mail in mbox format, is to try to export your mail in any format
other than mbox. Is it possible? You might otherwise use a converter
like

http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

Just my two cents,

-- 
Alberto

Re: Problems incorporating old mail

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Alberto Luaces <aluaces@udc.es> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen writes:
>
>> I'm still pretty baffled, hopefully something in the above will make a
>> little sense!
>
> Sorry, the only thing that I can think of, as you say that Evolution
> stores mail in mbox format, is to try to export your mail in any format
> other than mbox. Is it possible? You might otherwise use a converter
> like
>
> http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/

I did this, and got a maildir folder, but I'm embarrassed to say that I
don't know how to get these messages into gnus, either. nndir says that
the directory (which is full of messages) contains no messages, and
opening individual message files runs into the same problem: three
separate "messages" per message...

>
> Just my two cents,

Re: Problems incorporating old mail

[Alberto Luaces]

Eric Abrahamsen writes:

> I did this, and got a maildir folder, but I'm embarrassed to say that I
> don't know how to get these messages into gnus, either.

For importing a maildir folder, you have to have set up the mail
backend, nnml, as a primary or secondary source of mail like this:

(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods 
                  '(nnml ""))

After that, you specify that you own a maildir folder setting a source
for nnml:

(setq mail-sources
      '(
      (maildir :path "Path/to/your/folder"
                :subdirs ("cur" "new"))
                ))

-- 
Alberto

Re: Problems incorporating old mail

[Eric Abrahamsen]

Alberto Luaces <aluaces@udc.es> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen writes:
>
>> I did this, and got a maildir folder, but I'm embarrassed to say that I
>> don't know how to get these messages into gnus, either.
>
> For importing a maildir folder, you have to have set up the mail
> backend, nnml, as a primary or secondary source of mail like this:
>
> (add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods 
>                   '(nnml ""))
>
> After that, you specify that you own a maildir folder setting a source
> for nnml:
>
> (setq mail-sources
>       '(
>       (maildir :path "Path/to/your/folder"
>                 :subdirs ("cur" "new"))
>                 ))

Brilliant! That did the trick. Whatever the original problem was, this
works around it nicely.

I appreciate the help,
E