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

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 12:07 +0000, Jules Richardson wrote:

> 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...

Ok, if it is, then its a bug, its supposed to collapse linear white
space into a single space.  The bug might still exist.

> > >     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)

Yeah, what were they thinking ...

> 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... :-)

obs-month would be defined elsehwere and is probably some deprecated
option from the original rfc822.  Since month is surrounded by FWS, its
probably just something to do with linea white space or embedded
comments or something - which nobody uses anyway.

> > >     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.

Nod, I was just trying to streamline the process a bit.  It read a bit
more complex than it probably is.

 !Z