Announcing mbox-to-tiddlers

[Jeremy Ruston]

For a personal project I’ve lashed together a simple utility for converting email messages stored in mbox files into individual tiddlers.

https://github.com/Jermolene/mbox-to-tiddlers

Each message in the mbox file is converted into a separate tiddler with the following fields:

• title: message ID

• caption: message subject

• from: message sender

• text: message text

• type: text/plain

• modified: message date (in TiddlyWiki format)

mbox files are a standard export and storage format that is offered by many email clients and services. For testing, I was using mbox files generated by the macOS Mail.app.

As an example, I’ve included in the repository a 18MB TiddlyWiki containing all the messages from the main TiddlyWiki discussion group over the last year. It contains 6,907 tiddlers.

I’ve also copied that example to TiddlySpot for easier access — open the “Recent” tab to see some messages:

http://tw-msgs-07-2018-to-07-2019.tiddlyspot.com/

The next step is a better framework for browsing and viewing the messages.

Any questions or feedback welcome,

Best wishes

Jeremy

[@TiddlyTweeter]

Ciao Jeremy

Very good and very interesting. I really appreciate this kind of "leverasge" to bring stuff together.

One issue is the titles are very user unfriendly. Given what we talking sbout emails that may NOT have unique Subjects is difficult to see a solution of that issue. 

BUT maybe showing of subject as sub-title and maybe title (an index, basically) hidden?

Early thoughts

Josiah

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Josiah

Very good and very interesting. I really appreciate this kind of "leverasge" to bring stuff together.

Thanks. This sort of thing is surprisingly quick and easy to do when the necessary libraries exist.

One issue is the titles are very user unfriendly. Given what we talking sbout emails that may NOT have unique Subjects is difficult to see a solution of that issue. 

BUT maybe showing of subject as sub-title and maybe title (an index, basically) hidden?

Yes indeed. The demo doesn’t include any templates/scaffolding to make it easier to browse/use the messages, you’re just seeing the raw tiddlers.

The titles are ugly, but the message ID is the right choice because it is unique, and will in the future allow messages to be threaded together by their “reply-to” field. The subject line of the email is in the “caption” field.

Best wishes

Jeremy

Early thoughts

Josiah

On Thursday, 4 July 2019 19:03:42 UTC+2, Jeremy Ruston wrote:

For a personal project I’ve lashed together a simple utility for converting email messages stored in mbox files into individual tiddlers.

https://github.com/Jermolene/mbox-to-tiddlers

Each message in the mbox file is converted into a separate tiddler with the following fields:

• title: message ID

• caption: message subject

• from: message sender

• text: message text

• type: text/plain

• modified: message date (in TiddlyWiki format)

mbox files are a standard export and storage format that is offered by many email clients and services. For testing, I was using mbox files generated by the macOS Mail.app.

As an example, I’ve included in the repository a 18MB TiddlyWiki containing all the messages from the main TiddlyWiki discussion group over the last year. It contains 6,907 tiddlers.

I’ve also copied that example to TiddlySpot for easier access — open the “Recent” tab to see some messages:

http://tw-msgs-07-2018-to-07-2019.tiddlyspot.com/

The next step is a better framework for browsing and viewing the messages.

Any questions or feedback welcome,

Best wishes

Jeremy

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[PMario]

Hi Jeremy,

The TW contains e-mail addresses in plain text. So if an evil crawler finds them, they can end up in some spam databases, which isn't desireable.

So I think they should be obfuscated or removed.

-mario

[PMario]

Hi,

I think it should be the "subtitle" field instead of the "caption". caption is the short-title

subtitle is already a growing standard used in several plugins. .. subtitle is for longer titles.

just a thought.

mario

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Mario

The TW contains e-mail addresses in plain text. So if an evil crawler finds them, they can end up in some spam databases, which isn't desireable. 

So I think they should be obfuscated or removed.

Thanks for reminding me. I shall remove the data from tiddlyspot and github.

Best wishes

Jeremy.