Re: [Evolution] Importing from Outlook (using outport) - summary

[Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk yahoo co uk>]

On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 06:10, not zed wrote:
> On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 03:36, Jules Richardson wrote:
> >     Convert to Unix format (I used the dos2unix util, 
> >       but sed would do the job happily.)
>
> This isn't required actually.

It's needed in later stages for sed to detect end of lines properly (I
guess you're saying evo itself doesn't need it, which is fair enough :)

> >     Process message header to strip excess whitespace between field
> > names and contents - evo (at least 1.2.2) really doesn't like tabs in
> > this position, and outport seems to use them for some messages but not
> > all.
>
> Huh?  This shouldn't be an issue.

Maybe it's fixed in a later evo release? On my 1.2.2 version it
correctly detects header fields and data, but results in a character
looking like a square at the start of each data item in the 'from'
column within the GUI. Looks like evo's not skipping over the tab
character and is instead treating it as part of the header data...

> >     Process mail header to change 'Sent:' field to 'Date:', as evo seems
> > to only act on the Date field.
>
> Sent isn't a valid rfc822 field.  Infact, it sounds like its totally in
> the wrong format anyway, it has to be an rfc822 date which is pretty
> explict (and doesn't include long month names).

Blame outport for that one :)  No big deal anyway (in fact the formail
util can be given a parameter to change the field to Date, so that
doesn't even need to be done with sed or anything else)

The dates are in the right format other than the month, oddly enough.

According to http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2822.html the month spec for
dates is:

  month           =       (FWS month-name FWS) / obs-month
  month-name      =       "Jan" / "Feb" / "Mar" / "Apr" /
                          "May" / "Jun" / "Jul" / "Aug" /
                          "Sep" / "Oct" / "Nov" / "Dec"

I assume "obs-month" means "use whatever you like to satisfy local
conditions" which pretty much knocks on the head the point of there
being a spec :)  If true though that does mean that outport is adhering
to the spec in the way it formats dates, but they're pretty useless for
anything... :-)

> >     Finally pipe message through the 'formail' utility to correctly
> > format any included headers in the message text and to generate the
> > correct initial 'From' line before the message header fields.
>
> This isn't really required either, you just need "From -" between
> messages for evolution.  Though i guess its useful for more picky
> mailers.

Heh, that's handy to know - I didn't realise that.

In no way am I knocking evo by the way - it does a fantastic job. The
outport util could do with a little work though (and some code to
natively generate mbox files I think!!). This email's just for the
archives though as I'm sure somebody else will need to go through this
same process at some point.

cheers

Jules