how to import or add an mbox file?

[Nicholas Saunders]

I'm just looking to read old messages offline and local.

I backed up the .pinerc file and have a foo.mbox file which I'd like to add. When I launch pine I see a list of old file. Can I somehow add or import this mbox to that list?


thanks,

Nick

[Adam H. Kerman]

No importing required.

Just move it into the same directory or initiate your alpine session
with the full path to the file.

For instance, when I download control messages, they are in an mbox
archive and I can read them with alpine. I don't care to save them so
they get FTP'd to /tmp. Here's an archive I recently looked at.

alpine -if /tmp/uk.local.midlands

Without the full path, in my setup, my archived mboxes are in ~/mail, so
alpine would find it if I moved it to that directory.

Your mbox archive might be ~/Mail or something else. Check your .pinerc.

[Kalevi Kolttonen]

In your .pinerc, you need to define folder collections
with something like this:

folder-collections=Mail/[]

If you want to add more folders, separate their names
using commas.

Then just move your mbox file into the right directory:

mv -iv foo.mbox ~/Mail

You can then read your mailbox directly by using:

alpine -f foo.mbox

Or you can choose the correct folder from Folder List
menu that is in alpine's main menu.

br,
KK

[Nicholas Saunders]

Thanks, and that's what I've done. However, it just loads as a massive text file and not individual e-mails:

ALPINE 2.25 FOLDER LIST Folder: INBOX No Messages

INBOX sent-mail saved-messages 22aug_saved foo.mbox foobar sent-mail-aug-2022 sent-mail-dec-2022 sent-mail-may-2022 sent-mail-nov-2022
sent-mail-oct-2022 sent-mail-sep-2022


It's the "foo.mbox" which I'm looking at.

I'm thinking there's a setting in the pinerc to parse mbox?

[Nicholas Saunders]

When I run "alpine -f foo.mbox" I get a single large message rather than the expected list of messages.

The backup came from Thunderbird.

[Nicholas Saunders]

I think that I'm using the "maildir" format.

How do I switch to mbox?


thanks,

Nick

[Kalevi Kolttonen]

Nicholas Saunders <saunders...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks, and that's what I've done. However, it just loads as
> a massive text file and not individual e-mails:

Well, mbox-format *is* a massive or not so massive text file.

> It's the "foo.mbox" which I'm looking at.
>
> I'm thinking there's a setting in the pinerc to parse mbox?

Alpine should do that automatically as far as I know.

br,
KK

[John Levine]

According to Nicholas Saunders <saunders...@gmail.com>:

>I think that I'm using the "maildir" format.

No, maildir puts each message in a separate file. This sounds like it's
just a bunch of messages dumped into a file.

In an mbox file each message is preceded by a 'From ' line like the
one below with the sender's address and a timestamp. The first line in
the file has to be a From line.

From jo...@iecc.com Sun Sep 18 08:53:38 2016 -0400

>How do I switch to mbox?

If you're exporting the messages from Thunderbird, I am reasonably
sure that it uses mbox as its internal format, so I'd just look for
the mailbox you want in Thunderbird's directory and copy it.

--
Regards,
John Levine, jo...@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

[Nicholas Saunders]

That's where I'm confused. It's IMAP and Gmail. I couldn't find such files, at least on Linux (Ubuntu). I even downloaded a plugin. But the backups from the plugin weren't readable by even mailutils. The Pine local storage is readable by the mail command, which is enough portability for my purposes. Probably I wasn't doing the backups from Thunderbird correctly, but I never figured it out.

Pine's working fine for this. I was using export at first, but it was suggested to use save and that works fine.


-Nick