Slashdot Mirror
Exporting Netscape Messenger to HTML
Chris Carlin
asks: "I've been useing Netscape Messenger for
years as my main email client, and I think it works great for
my needs. Anyway, I tend to be a packrat with email and save
just about everything. As a result I now have thousands of
messages organized and taking up much space on my hard drive
and I'd just plain like to get the stuff off my disk onto CD.
I'd like to export in such a way that I won't need Communicator
to read them at a later date, which brings me (finally) to my
question: since Netscape doesn't seem to have a way of exporting
all messages to a tree of directories of HTML files, is there
a program that could? What else could I do with them that would
preserve the oragnization but not require that I keep a copy of
Netscape on the computer forever if I want to have access to
the email?"
Speaking of perl scripts, look into MHonarc.
Home Page
FAQ
Here's the description:
MHonArc is a Perl mail-to-HTML converter. MHonArc provides HTML mail archiving with index, mail thread linking, etc; plus other capabilities
including support for MIME and powerful user customization features.
Earl Hood has done all the work for you. Good stuff.
I was in Outlook 97 hell for 1.5 years, and that's why I am moving. I managed to find some shareware that worked with Outlook to save the messages as they arrived to text with mildly bogus headers that had to be converted on Unix.
Here's an oddball suggestion that might work for you if you can work out the details. Trick your MS mail program into remailing the messages to a Unix mail spool, where you can do what you please. Of course, the "detail" is how to preserve the sender.
If you can post somewhere examples of the database, it might be crackable, a true public service to all in MS mail hell. All their mail programs and servers are like that.
For examples of how complex their formats are, look at the MSWORDView project Home Page http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/
When possible, I have tried to use mail clients and sendmail to do all the conversion for me rather than write scripts to do so. ( lazy sysadmin syndrome )
I don't think you want to try to crack the format. I do that sort of thing for a living and it aint trivial. You can access the Mail storages using the Win32 MAPI (Mail API). It isn't easy to use, but it would be your easiest bet if you have to DIY.
when exporting?
that's the real space saver. or how about deleting all messages by a specific email address or all those not from a table of email addresses?
AFAIK Netscape and Eudora use the standard Unix mailbox format, in addition to just about every non-MS maler on the planet. (Zmail is an exception, it needs a simple conversion util to "massage" the mailbox format.) The only thing you have to watch out for is CR CR/LF conversion if you're using Eudora. I'm not sure how Netscape handles CR/LF stuff. It might handle it in the default method for its platform, or it might do it the same way across all platforms.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Use the 'imap' package for Linux to provide both imap2 and pop3 services. With any mail client that supports the IMAP protocol, you can create folders on the server and copy your mail to those. (On the server, these mailboxes will appear as regular UNIX/UUCP mailboxes, all except the inbox will be in /home//mail/ by default).
In the case of Netscape for UNIX, you do not have to go through that step, as its mailboxes are already in UUCP format.
Then use the package 'hypermail' to convert these mailboxes to HTML pages.
Another alternative would be to use the MH 'inc' command, to separate each mail into a separate MH-style file, and perhaps do a 'scan +folder > indexfile'.
I'm stuck i a similar situation, except that it's an MS hell. I have used Internet Mail 3.0 (the mailer for IE 3) for about 2 years now, and would seriously like to move all that accumulated mail to something else. A lot of research have'nt turned out anything that could converte their proprietary format (a kind of database format where the index and the data are kept separately in no particuliar order) for mail box to something else. If you know of a trick that could do it (I am especially looking at converting all this mail to plain ASCII), please let me know.
And don't say I should'nt have used it in the first place; I already know it, that's why I'm moving.
Thanx !
Etyenne
:wq
A quick look at my netscape (4.08 - Linux) mail folders makes 'em look like fairly standard Unix mailbox files to me. Messages separated by a line beginning with "From ", and such. I'm sure there's just tons of options for translating those into any format you'd like; nor should it be hard to hack up something to do *exactly* what you want in Python, Perl, or whatever the language of your choice happens to be.
Have a look at Hypermail for nice HTML translating and threading, that's just the first thing that comes to mind.