[plug] print contents list of mbox folder

[Bernd Felsche]

Russell <russellsteicke at gmail.com> writes:
>On 9/17/06, Gavin Chester <sales at ecosolutions.com.au> wrote:

>> Can't find _anywhere_ instruction on how I can print (hardcopy or
>> to a formatted file) the list of emails in a folder such as
>> /inbox/plug/ that is in (evolution) mbox format.  That is, I want
>> to print out the email list with just the 'from', 'to', 'subject'
>> being almost all that shows such that the output resembles what
>> you see when looking at the list of email in your email client.

>Trivial mbox parsing is easy.  Handling all the corner cases is hard.
>Continuation lines (header lines starting with white space continue
>the previous line) and slightly different From_ line formats are the
>most obvious.  And I think that header field names are case-folded,
>although almost everything uses "From" and "To" instead of "from" and
>"to".

>Here's a trivial awk script that ignores most of those cases:

>#!/usr/bin/awk -f
>BEGIN { Inheaders=0; }
>/^From / { Inheaders=1; }
>/^(To|From|Subject):/ { if (Inheaders) { print $0; } }
>/^$/ { if (Inheaders) { Inheaders=0; print ""; } }

Python has some handy modules for that sort of thing.

This should get you started; there are examples in the Python
documentation that you may not have installed in
/usr/share/doc/packages/python/Demo/
e.g. scripts/mboxconvert.py

Modules email and mailbox are quite useful.
(module rfc822 has been superseded by email)

http://docs.python.org/lib/module-mailbox.html
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-email.html
-- 
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