using fbcmd to archive messages
Gerald Oskoboiny
I have been hoping to find some way to archive my facebook email
for quite some time; I am delighted to see that fbcmd seems only
a few quick hacks away from being able to do so. (the last time I
checked the API docs it seemed completely impossible without
resorting to screen-scraping)
What I'd like to do is to create rfc2822-style messages based on
FB's message data, including Subject: and Date: headers, and From:
lines with fake email addresses corresponding to fb userids a la:
From: Gerald Oskoboiny <go...@facebook.com>
or
From: Bob Loblaw <123123...@facebook.com>
(presuming users' real email addresses are not available via API,
and even if they were, that most would be privacy-restricted)
I have only begun playing with fbcmd so I am not really sure
what's possible; one thing I haven't figured out yet is how to
get a list of all the thread ids in my inbox and sentmail folders
(it seems to show a maximum of 100); any way around that?
Also, fbcmd msg {threadid} doesn't seem to work for messages with
thread ids less than 10000000000 (which seems to have started
some time around Feb 1 2008); is that a known API limitation, or
an obscure bug somewhere? (not really crucial since I'll be fairly
happy with an archive of my email since then; just checking)
My overall implementation approach would probably be:
- hack fbcmd to add a mode that outputs messages in rfc2822
format (maybe add a variant of 'msg' called 'msgmbox'
or something)
- get a list of thread ids (as many as possible)
- for each threadid we haven't seen before, run
fbcmd msgmbox {threadid} > threadid.mbox
Sound reasonable? Anyone tried something like this already?
(using fbcmd or otherwise)
--
Gerald Oskoboiny <ger...@impressive.net>
http://impressive.net/people/gerald/