Saving Your E-mail With mboxify

mboxify is a BeOS DR8 shell command that dumps all the mail stored in a volume's database to a Unix-style mbox file (standard format, NOT SCO). It's available at ftp://ftp.be.com/pub/dr8.3_update/mboxify.tar.gz.

This is useful if you want to move or back up all mail stored on a DR8 BeOS volume. An mbox file can be read by almost any Unix-compatible mail reader.

To use mboxify, install it in your /boot/bin directory. Then...

	% mboxify

With no arguments, mboxify will list all usable mounted databases.

	% mboxify vol_ID
	% mboxify vol_name

When given a volume to dump (either a volume ID or volume name, printed by the previous no-argument invocation), mboxify will collect all mail on that volume and dump it to standard out. It's common to re-direct the standard output to a file, i.e.

	% mboxify BeVolume > mymail.mbox

NOTE: for uninteresting reasons, the mbox text file is formatted for PCs (CRLF). You may have to convert it to a Macintosh (CR) or Unix (LF) text file for your mail reader to read it properly. The Metrowerks IDE is good at this (the rightmost pop-up menu in the lower-left corner of the window).

If mboxify doesn't work, perhaps its permissions were lost somewhere. Try...

	% cd /boot/bin/		# or wherever you installed the command
	% setfile mboxify
	% chmod a+x mboxify

mboxify also provides extremely rudimentary mail re-integration:

	% mboxify BeVolume < mymail.mbox

will read the mail out of mymail.mbox and store it in the specified volume's database. However, dates and priority are not preserved, and no checking for duplicate messages is performed. Again, mymail.mbox must be a PC-formatted text file.

mboxify is only for DR8 and will not run on the Advanced Acces release.