The Amiga email and news program MicroDot II uses its own proprietary format to store messages, thus moving to an other email or news program is not as easy as it could be, requiring manual conversion of the message base.
This document describes moving the email part of the message base to the
Maildir format.
It is a standard format like the usual
mbox, but has
technical and
performance advantages over
the latter.
It is supported by MUAs like
Mutt,
MTAs like
Exim, Postfix
and qmail,
MDAs like
maildrop and
procmail and
IMAP4/POP3
servers like Dovecot and
Courier to just name a few.
While the actual conversion will happen on your Unix box, you of course have to start on the Amiga side to acquire a copy of MicroDot II's message base.
To avoid that deleted messages reappear, launch
MicroDot II and select
Empty TRASH and then Cleanup database from
the MicroDot menu.
This will take a while, once its done quit
MicroDot II.
Open a Shell and CD into the directory where
MicroDot II's Data
directory resides, in most cases
MicroDot II's directory.
Create an archive of MicroDot II's
Data directory using
LhA:
lha -r -z a WORK:md2.lha Data
This assumes WORK: being a disk with enough free space where you want
to store the archive.
Transfer md2.lha to some working directory on your Unix box, ie. via
FTP.
Extract the archive using
LhA for Unix, which
should be available in your Linux Distribution or BSD flavour of choice:
lha x md2.lha
cd Data
As you only need the messages themselves which are stored in the DBX_*
directories, remove all other files:
rm -f *.ix *.IX Grouplist.* UIDL.history sendtmp.*
To separate emails and news, move all messages containing Newsgroups:
headers to a temporary directory:
mkdir tmp
grep -rilZ '^Newsgroups:' DBX_* | xargs -r -0 -i{} mv {} tmp
Note: This of course does include news forwarded by email and mails forwarded by news!
To recover those, move all messages containing Received: headers to
another temporary directory:
mkdir DBX_tmp
grep -rilZ '^Received:' tmp | xargs -r -0 -i{} mv {} DBX_tmp
You now have to manually check all files in DBX_tmp and delete any
news articles containing forwarded emails while preserving any emails containing
forwarded news articles.
There should only be a few files in DBX_tmp however, e.g. I
had about 10 out of 31000 in total, so this step should not be much work.
Remove the news articles:
rm -rf tmp
The DBX_* directories now only contain email messages and you are
ready to convert them to the
Maildir format using any
MDA supporting it.
Assuming you use maildrop,
create a domaildrop script somewhere in your PATH with
the following content:
#!/bin/sh
cat $1 | maildrop
You should already have setup your system to use
Maildir and have
working mail filter rules set up, ie. in this case in your
$HOME/.mailfilter file.
It is very important that the mail filter does work, otherwise your mails
will end up in the wrong folders or even get lost. If you have any rules in your filter
that check for SPAM, temporarily disable them both for performance reasons and to
avoid potential false positives in your old mail.
Remember that mail from old mailing lists you are not subscribed anymore or which
changed some header you filter on also require rules matching them.
Now deliver your mails into your
Maildir folders:
find DBX_* -type f -exec domaildrop \{\} \;
Your mails are now sorted into your
Maildir folders, however
the most tedious work begins now.
As all the mails were just delivered, they are marked new and unread, thus you have
to start your MUA of choice and manually
set any mail flags as desired and eventually move any mail that got sorted into the
wrong folder to the correct one.
Once you are done with that, you have successfully moved from MicroDot II to an open standard mail storage format accessible by a wide range of MUAs and easily convertible to other standard mail storage formats without requiring any manual work.
This document is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.