Re: MH -> mbox

[The Speed of Dark <pwcabach erols com>]

	Yep, Just did this myself. I used the 'packf' command. The packf
command should be included
in your MH or nmh distribution.

Commentary:
	I found that as of Balsa 1.0.0, it kept up with nested MH folders
OK, but it was slow.
Additionally, MH uses the .mh_sequences file to track new messages, which
Balsa doesn't. Finally,
I found a problem under Balsa that I'd also occasionally had under exmh.
The sequences would 
become un-synced and I'd click on a message and the contents wouldn't jive
with the headers.
I'd have the headers of one message and the contents of another.

Anyway...

	Here is the method that I used:

	Note: the ~ convention only works under tcsh, csh and bash. NOT sh
or ksh. If you use
	either of these shells, use ${HOME} instead of the ~ .

	I kept all the applicable sub-folders but refiled any messages so
the sub-directories only
contained the folders (directories) that I wanted to keep and convert to
mboxes. I reconstructed the
directory structure that was under the ~/Mail under ~/mail . For example:

	~/Mail/Lists/NASA 
	~/Mail/Lists/Poli

	the 'Lists' subdir contained no messages of its own, just the
subfolders 'NASA' , 'Poli' and a
bunch of others. I did a 'mkdir ~/mail/Lists' and then used packf to create
the mbox equivalents. 

	packf +Mail/Lists/NASA -file ~/mail/Lists/NASA

	This created an mbox called NASA under ~/mail/Lists . I did this
for every sub folder under
~/Mail/Lists. OK, I did it all in half-a-dozen  for-while loops, since I
had about 250 mailboxes to
convert. :) 
	The important bit is to make sure that the sub-directories (in this
example. ~/Mail/Lists) are 
just directories under the ~/mail structure. So if there are messages in
~/Mail/Lists, they need be 
refiled into different MH folders before converting. 

	So, is that clear? Or have I just made it worse? :)
	
-- 

Hwyl!

Fletch

"I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor. 
And I'm happy to state that I've finally won out over it."
                                 --"Elwood P. Dowd" from 'Harvey'


On 2001.01.12 16:39:40 -0500 Dave Euser wrote:

  I'm looking to switch back over to balsa (last time I used was <
  filtering)...seems that currently (in CVS) nested MH folders don't
  work....if anyone can recommend a solution to this, or even better, a
  conversion utility (from MH->mbox) - I dug around and found a few old
  Perl scripts (circa 1996). None seemed to do the job properly......
  
  Thanks
  Dave
  dave_euser@yahoo.com
  
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