[thelist] nothing opens mail file

Daniel J. Cody djc at starkmedia.com
Sat Aug 25 01:17:59 CDT 2001


if its on a unix based system and you have a shell account on it, open 
the mbox with pine.

yes, those command line applications really do kick ass.

first off, move the mbox to a new directory(copy it). configure pine to 
open the mbox in the new place. it will take a couple minutes, but once 
you have your messages open in pine, use the 'export' or 'save' commands 
to filter a couple 1000 off at a time to a seperate file(learn how using 
the help commands in pine) in your directory. once you have, say 55 
saved files with 1000 messages a piece, move one of them to your spool 
file(usually /var/spool/mail/user ) then have your regular email client 
download them one batch at a time. once you've downloaded the first 
batch to your regular client, copy the next batch that you saved from 
pine to your spool file again. Lather, Rinse, and repeat 54 times :)

it will take a bit of time and work to do this(or use a perl script to 
sort them as anthony mentioned), but if you're interested in getting 
those emails, its not a shabby plan ;)

good luck, shout if you have probs ;)

.djc.

Erik Mattheis wrote:
> I have a user who's mailbox is 216 MB ... he turned on a vacation 
> message which got in a feedback loop with a Majordomo list - 55,159 
> messages before I noticed it. I downloaded the messages to the iMail 
> client, intending to filter messages from Majordomo to a mailbox, but it 
> freezes each time it tries to open it. How can I extract the wanted 
> messages from the behemoth?






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