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cellio...a tool that will let me banish Outlook from my desktop once and for all.
I'm using Outlook at work through historical happenstance, even though I know it's hell-spawn and I've never actually liked it. I would like to switch to pine, a mailer that I know, like, and trust not to inflict virii and gratuitous HTML and similar crap upon me. The problem is that I have 10 months' worth of saved mail, in folders, that is important. I want to be able to move that mail to pine format. This means converting from whatever internal format Microsoft is using to plain text (no HTML markup), ideally in nicely-formatted lines under 80 characters, and pine-ifying it (inserting the characters that separate messages). Quoted text still needs to look like quoted text, even if the message used indentation rather than explicit demarcation. I want to preserve the existing sets of folders automagically; I'm willing to export one folder at a time and copy the resulting file to the right place in the pine directory structure, but I'm not willing to dump everything in one huge file and sort it out again.
I'm also not really willing to forward all my saved mail to myself, partly because of the one-huge-pile problem and partly because I want From lines to be meaningful. (The latter could possibly be fixed by a different script that would rewrite the resulting files.) Mostly, though, because it would be a tedious manual process.
I fear, though, that I'm going to be stuck with Outlook forever.
I'm using Outlook at work through historical happenstance, even though I know it's hell-spawn and I've never actually liked it. I would like to switch to pine, a mailer that I know, like, and trust not to inflict virii and gratuitous HTML and similar crap upon me. The problem is that I have 10 months' worth of saved mail, in folders, that is important. I want to be able to move that mail to pine format. This means converting from whatever internal format Microsoft is using to plain text (no HTML markup), ideally in nicely-formatted lines under 80 characters, and pine-ifying it (inserting the characters that separate messages). Quoted text still needs to look like quoted text, even if the message used indentation rather than explicit demarcation. I want to preserve the existing sets of folders automagically; I'm willing to export one folder at a time and copy the resulting file to the right place in the pine directory structure, but I'm not willing to dump everything in one huge file and sort it out again.
I'm also not really willing to forward all my saved mail to myself, partly because of the one-huge-pile problem and partly because I want From lines to be meaningful. (The latter could possibly be fixed by a different script that would rewrite the resulting files.) Mostly, though, because it would be a tedious manual process.
I fear, though, that I'm going to be stuck with Outlook forever.
(no subject)
Date: 2002-02-07 06:18 pm (UTC)Pine (whether for Win32 or Un*x) uses standard unix mail spool format, which means that it assumes that a line beginning with "From" means the start of a new message.
That's reassuring. I was looking at existing Pine folders (which were built by Pine, not imported), and they seem to have some special stuff at the beginning of the file and then, for each message, several lines of headers before you ever get to the From: line. But presumably its reading is more flexible.
In fact, why not ditch proprietary software entirely and go open source? You won't have all these problems.
It's the work machine; Windows is a requirement of the job. :-(
My home machine is currently Windows, though we've got a spare machine now that we're trying to configure as a Linux box. If that works out, we can then switch the other machines. I have a Unix shell account for personal mail, though (and news, and web space, and all that good stuff). I can run pc-pine on the Windows box at work, once I salvage the existing mail. Or, as another person suggested, even before. Maybe that's a project for tomorrow.