Maildirarc

Introduction

Maildirarc is a tool for archiving a given set of Maildir folders. It can archive them to other Maildir folders, or to mbox files. It has options to tailor the exact behaviour to hopefully suit most mail setups.

Maildirarc is written in Perl and requires the following libraries:

• Getopt::Long
• File::Copy
• Date::Parse (part of the TimeDate CPAN module)
• Email::Address

The first two are usually installed with Perl.

Usage

Run maildirarc to view the usage information:

Usage: maildirarc [-h] [-f folder] [-m mbox] [-d days] [-r] [-c] [-F] [-s] [-n] folder [folder...]
Archives the contents of the given folders.

  -f    the full path of the archive folder [default: [folder].archive]
  -m    the full path of the archive mbox
        (%y substituted for year, %m month, %n for folder name)
  -d    the age, in days, at which to archive a message [default: 90]
  -r    REMOVE the messages rather than move them
  -c    copy rather than move messages (leaves original intact)
  -F    replace "From " with ">From " when doing mbox archiving
  -s    skip unparseable messages when mbox archiving
  -n    don't do anything; just say what would be done
  -h    print longer help information

Note that Maildirarc only looks in the cur folder of a given Maildir folder. This means anything in new will be ignored. Since Maildirarc is primarily an archival tool it doesn't make sense to archive stuff that hasn't been seen yet.

mbox Format

There are various mbox formats in existence, so I had to choose which one to use for Maildirarc. I decided on the variant known as mboxcl2. The mboxcl2 format does not quote lines in the message body that start with "From ", instead it adds a Content-Length header so readers can determine where the next message starts. This is consistent with the behaviour of Mutt.

To enable quoting of lines in the message body that start with "From " use the -F command line option. You may wish to do this for maximum compatibility with other mail readers.

Maildirarc needs to create the "From " separator line for each message when adding it to an mbox file. To do this it requires the delivery date and the sender's email address. It obtains these as follows:

• The delivery date is taken by looking first at the Delivery-date header. If that doesn't exist it next looks at the latest Received header. As a last resort it looks at the Date header, which although not ideal (because it could be bogus or invalid) it might be the only header in a sent items folder. If a date cannot be parsed or isn't found at all Maildirarc will abort.

• The sender's email address is obtained by looking at these headers in order: Return-path, From, Sender, Reply-To. If it fails to find an address in any of those it aborts.

Examples

Some example uses of Maildirarc taken from the maildirarc --help output:

# Archive messages older than 30 days in /home/tdb/Maildir
# to the Maildir folder /home/tdb/Maildir/.old
maildirarc -f /home/tdb/Maildir/.old -d 30 /home/tdb/Maildir

# Archive messages older than 90 days for both of these folders
# to a sub-folder (courier style) called archive
maildirarc -d 90 /home/tdb/Maildir/.lists /home/tdb/Maildir/.work

# Test to see what would be archived with the default settings
# in the folder /home/tdb/Maildir/.personal
maildirarc -n /home/tdb/Maildir/.personal

# Archive messages older than 30 days in the Maildir folder
# /home/tdb/Maildir/.spam to the mbox file called
# /home/tdb/MailArchive/spam
maildirarc -d 30 -m /home/tdb/MailArchive/spam /home/tdb/Maildir/.spam

# Remove messages older than 15 days from /home/tdb/Maildir/.vspam
maildirarc -d 15 -r /home/tdb/Maildir/.vspam

# Make a complete copy of /home/tdb/Maildir/.folder
maildirarc -d 0 -c -f /home/tdb/Maildir/.foldercopy /home/tdb/Maildir/.folder

Potential Issues

• There is currently no locking. This is a particular issue when archiving to mbox files that may be accessed by other applications. Maildirarc's current behaviour keeps mbox files open until it exits which may further compound the issue.

• Maildirarc keeps mbox files open whilst running. This could mean a file descriptor limit is hit. This method of operation may be reconsidered.

• Maildirarc does not escape lines starting with "From ". This may cause compatibility issues with other mail readers. If it's a problem for you, or you'd just like maxmium compatibility, use the -F command line option to enable "From " escaping.

• The format of messages in mbox files has been deduced by looking at RFCs and examining the behaviour of other programs, in particular Mutt. The files haven't been extensively tested with other applications, although problems are not anticipated.

• If Maildirarc finds any of the following headers when converting to mbox format it'll throw them away and replace them with our generated ones. The reasoning for this is that we know ours to be correct by examining the message and Maildir flags making it safe to replace them. Use the --debug flag to see what the differences in the headers are.

   Status:
   X-Status:
   Content-Length:
  

• Maildirarc originally added a Lines header to messages when converting them to mbox format. However, after some web searching, and reading of RFC 5536, I concluded these were used for news rather than email, and even there they're now deprecated. So now Maildirarc completely ignores the Lines header.

• The processing order of messages is based upon the sorted order of filenames within the Maildir's cur directory. It looks like the Maildir specification uses a timestamp as the first part of the filename, so in theory this guarantees they'll be sorted in time order. However, if your files have different names, and you're archiving to mbox files, the order may not be what you'd expect.

License

Maildirarc is released under the GPLv2 license. See the COPYING file for details.