archmbox 4.9.0 review

Archmbox is a simple email archiver written in perl; it parses one or more mailboxes, selects some or all messages and then performs

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Alessandro Dotti Contra

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Archmbox is a simple email archiver written in perl; it parses one or more mailboxes, selects some or all messages and then performs specific actions on the selected messages.

At this time archmbox supports mbox and mbx mailbox formats.

Four different modes are available:

list mode, which is useful to list all selected messages before archmbox performs the real operations (archiving or deleting)
kill mode, if messages should be deleted from the mailbox(es) rather than archived
archive mode, to archive the selected messages in a different mailbox
copy mode, to copy the selected messages from the source mailbox

Messages selection is based upon a date criteria; an absolute date or a days offset can be specified. It is also possible to refine the selection using regular expressions on the header fields of the message.

All archived messages are stored in a new mailbox with the same name of the original one plus .archived as extension (this is the default, but can be changed); the archive mailbox can be saved in gz or bz2 compressed format as well.

Archmbox was successfully tested on the following platforms:

Linux
FreeBSD
NetBSD
OpenBSD
MacOS X
OpenDarwin
Sun Solaris

A little hack is needed for Sun Solaris; please read here or the INSTALL file included with the distribution for further details.

Requirements:
Archmbox is a perl based script with no additional module other than the standard ones provided with normal perl distributions.
It has been developed and tested on a Linux system with perl 5.6.1.
Archmbox also uses some standard shell binaries: fuser, rm, cat, cp, gzip.
If fuser is not available on the system, lsof or fstat can be used as a replacement.
bzip2 is needed only if you want to use bzip compression with archive mailboxes.
An external converter is required to handle mbx mailboxes. At this time support for mbxcvt and mailutil is available. If you use a different convert and want it to be supported, feel free to write me.


What's New in This Release:
some mailboxes/directories can be skipped, using a regular expression, while archiving (Thanks to Buck Holsinger).
the TMP_DIR environment variable was renamed to ARCHMBOX_TMP_DIR.
the list mode's output is no longer generated using perl formats.
This fixes some problems that may sometimes arise when archmbox is piped trough a pager (bug 1115657 reported by Buck Holsinger).
option -n was removed.