Re: [Evolution] Importing from KMail -- Lost Messages

[Garry Williams <garry zvolve com>]

On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 17:10 -0500, Rob Matlack wrote:
> I would like to import my mail from KMail to Evolution. My KMail folders are 
> in MBox format. I have tried simply copying the folders to the correct 
> Evolution location, importing with automatic detection, and importing with 
> MBox selected. All three have the same results--I lose emails. In one folder 
> of about 50 I lost about 12. They seem to come in as blank emails, no body, 
> no headers. I have compacted the folder before importing. I understand that 
> there are different MBox formats.

I had troubles when I imported from UNIX mbox-es, too.

I have no idea what your problem is, but the same symptoms were produced
in my case because some of my messages had lines in them that matched
this regular expression:

    ^[Ff]rom[[:space:]]

It seems that Evolution's importer treats *any* line beginning with the
word from (either capitalized or not) followed by a space as a message
header.

I fixed it by examining all lines matching the problem and inserting a
`>' character in front of them before importing.

I also notice that Evolution does not realize that a line beginning with
`>From ' is *not* a quote.  (The convention is that `>>From ' is a quote
-- not a quote of a quote.)

I don't know if the "quoting" of a line beginning with the characters
`From ' is specified in a standard, but it is very well-understood
practice among E-mail clients that manipulate mbox format files.

My problem was caused by two different events: my UNIX mail client
(mutt) would copy a mail message to a mbox file without quoting the
lines beginning with `From '.  I found out that this practice was not
ambiguous because mutt maintained the Content-Length: header accurately
and used it to parse the messages in mbox files.  MIME also
disambiguates the length of a message.  (Of course there is no
requirement for a mail message to have any special treatment for such
lines in their bodies.  MTAs are completely insensitive to them.)

The other problem was that Evolution's importer considered `from ' a
separator, too.  That's just plain wrong.

HTH

-- 
Garry Williams, Zvolve Systems, Inc., +1 770 813-4934
                                Cell: +1 404 353-2983