You've got m@il

By Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay

---

One of the major hindrances to a complete migration to Free/Open Source Software has always been the mail transport/user agents. Indeed, it has been heard once too often on LUG mailing lists that "I could switch over to GNU/Linux but what to do with my mails ?"





Part of this problem lies with the fact that MSOutlookExpress & MSOutlook (MSOE & MSO) create a proprietary .dbx format in which to store the mail, and part lies with the fact that no *good* utility was available to facilitate the switchover.





Lament no more !! Help is at hand and break free as you've got m@il





ABOUT THIS DOCUMENT





[1] Assumes that you know where your mail agent stores the data


[2] Assumes that you realise the importance of not disturbing your production data


[3] Assumes that you are familiar with working from the command-line interface





OBJECTIVE





Simply put, the aim is to convert .dbx mail datastores into .mbox or .mbx datastores that are compatible with conventional FLOSS mail agents.





TELL ME HOW





A Google search with the string "DBXConv" will return the relevant page as the topmost result. However, if you are too unwilling to do the search, the utility we will use can be found here.





The site states:





This program will extract the messages from an Outlook Express (5.0 - 5.5) mailbox and convert it either to the standard mbox or the Outlook Express eml format. The advantage of saving your mail in mbox format is, that it's a plain text format, which can be read by many mail-clients




Do not take the MSOE version at face value !! The utility seems to work fine with MSOE v6.0 also




Steps are:





[i] take a copy of the entire mail store to some different folder. eg assuming that the store was at D:\Mail, copy it to (say) E:\Mail


[ii] unzip the downloaded dbxconv.exe into this (E:\Mail) folder


[iii] from the command-line interface browse to this directory


[iv] run dbxconv *.dbx




voila !! you have got m@il... importing/copying the .mbx/.mbox files so created to the directory/store of your preferred mail agent/client will enable you to access all stored mails without missing any of them or switching between OSs.





Converting to eml is simple.

Run from a command-line interface dbxconv -eml *.dbx







DBXConv.zip can be found here


The complete source code for this GPL-ed utility can be found here
- posted by sankarshan @ 4/11/2003 10:34:00 PM