{"id":427,"date":"2008-07-12T14:51:59","date_gmt":"2008-07-12T19:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/?p=427"},"modified":"2022-09-11T00:40:38","modified_gmt":"2022-09-11T00:40:38","slug":"the-great-mail-merge-of-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/2008\/07\/the-great-mail-merge-of-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Mail Merge of 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, like a lot of computer people, I have the odd clepto-esque habit of saving all<\/em> of my email.\u00a0 Now, this wouldn’t be anything newsworthy if I had done a decent job of it, and just kept some nice little archive folder somewhere, or fed it all into GMail and had done.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, what I actually<\/em> kept over the years is a mess of “I’m about to reformat this machine, copy all the mail off and I’ll deal with it later” backups.\u00a0 In fact, I have no less than 123 mbox files from past Thunderbird installs, 4 more mboxes from an Evolution backup, 4 Outlooks PSTs, and for good measure two Outlook Express profile folders and a maildir from… well, I actually have no idea where that’s from… maybe KMail once upon a time?<\/p>\n

So, upwards of 132 independent message sources.\u00a0 Nice work, Colin.<\/p>\n

First off, some interesting stats about this pile of mail:<\/p>\n

Earliest Date<\/dt>\n: March 15, 2002<\/dd>\n
Latest Date<\/dt>\n: June 21, 2007<\/dd>\n
Total Emails Archived<\/dt>\n: 15493<\/dd>\n
Number of Duplicate Copies<\/dt>\n: 12567<\/dd>\n
Percent of Messages With \u22651 Duplicate<\/dt>\n: 27.87%<\/dd>\n
Average Number of Duplicates (of those with \u22651)<\/dt>\n: 2.910<\/dd>\n
Maximum Number of Duplicates<\/dt>\n: 14<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
And for posterity’s sake (aka, the next<\/em> time I have to do this…) here’s some tips on how to clean up the mess:<\/p>\n
\n
Use Thunderbird + the Remove Duplicates (Alternate) Plugin<\/strong>
\nI really can’t say enough about the “Remove Duplicate Messages (Alternate)” plugin<\/a>.\u00a0 I highly<\/em> recommend it over the non-Alternate version.\u00a0 Here’s the basic idea.\u00a0 Install the plugin.\u00a0 Right-click a Thunderbird folder and select “Set Original message folder(s) for next duplicate search.”\u00a0 Then, right-click some other folder and select “Remove Duplicates…”.\u00a0 Up pops a window (after a few brief seconds of churn) with a list showing all duplicate (or triplicate or more) messages, side by side to make it abundantly clear that they are true duplicates.\u00a0 Hit [OK] and they’re gone.\u00a0 Perfect.\u00a0 Clean, simple, and effective.<\/li>\n
How to Import mail from Outlook PSTs<\/strong>
\nThe one key point to make here is that the only program I trust to read Outlook’s PST format is Outlook. I’ve seen a few open source \/ third party tools, such as LibPST<\/a>, but mostly they’re shareware “recovery” apps, and they just scare me :).\u00a0 Besides, if you have Outlook to make<\/em> the PST, just use it to read it.\u00a0 Or ask a friend.\u00a0 Whatever.
\nThe magic to getting your messages out of Outlook is: Thunderbird! Just install on the same machine as Outlook, have Outlook running with your PST opened (File->Open->Outlook data file…), and use Thunderbird’s Tools->Import… feature to suck in all the messages from Outlook.\u00a0 Remove those you weren’t interested in and you’re done.\u00a0 The rest are now present in Thunderbird.<\/li>\n
How to Import mail from Maildirs<\/strong>
\nThe magic here is a neat little shell script by Joerg Reinhardt, which I found on linuxquestions.org<\/a>.\u00a0 Drill is, run it like:sh md2mb.sh <maildir><\/code>and you’ll get an mbox out named maildir.mbox<\/code><\/li>\n
How to Import mail from Outlook Express<\/strong> \nYeah, I know.\u00a0 Outlook Express is old<\/em>, not geeky, etc.. but back in the day (these messages are dated from 2002) I was young and naive, so here we are.\u00a0 How to deal?\u00a0 Well, the simplest way I found is just to copy my dbx files back over top a blank identity in Outlook Express on an XP box.\u00a0 Use a VM or an old machine, either way.\u00a0 Then install Thunderbird alongside, and import just as to extract messages from PSTs.\u00a0 Notes: I was not able to get readdbx<\/code> fromlibdbx<\/a> working, nor was I able to open the dbx’s in Outlook 2003 by tring to import them using the Import\/Export tools.\u00a0 Sad face.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nAnd there you have it: how to build your very own email archive Frankenstein, bootstrapped up from over a hundred pieces and jolted into life with a dash of Thunderbird.\u00a0 (And yes, Jason, I know you could write me a VBA app in 5 minutes to do this whole mess in Outlook… but you’re not here :-P)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So, like a lot of computer people, I have the odd clepto-esque habit of saving all of my email.\u00a0 Now, this wouldn’t be anything newsworthy if I had done a decent job of it, and just kept some nice little archive folder somewhere, or fed it all into GMail and had done. Unfortunately, what I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1576,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427\/revisions\/1576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mccambridge.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}