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mbox can't be implemented properly, it is an inherently broken format. Or rather, a family of almost compatible broken formats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M
by abrahamsen 13y ago
mbox can't be implemented properly, it is an inherently broken format. Or rather, a family of almost compatible broken formats.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox
Sounds like Mail.app exported in mboxcl2, which breaks mail readers expecting the mboxo or the mboxrd formats.
I recommend people to use IMAP for extracting the mail, and to store it in something outside the mbox family.
- gamache 13y agoI've got mbsync set up to periodically dump my Gmail into a local Maildir archive. Works great, and it was a (relative) breeze to integrate with my old mail archives reaching back to the late 90's.
- groby_b 13y agoHow is mbox a broken format? It's a bad idea to use it in a multi-writer environment, and it's horrible because there are competing versions of it. But for plain storage, I thought it worked quite well. What am I missing?
- chalst 13y agoAny line following a blank line and beginning with the four characters "From" marks the start of a new message. The BSD way of handling such lines in the body of a message was to prefix them with ">", which is a non-reversible workaround and is in the uuencode target charset. Prefixing every line in the message body with a tab character would allow reversing and not interfere with uuencode/base64&c.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pieps 13y agoTakeout engineer here. We currently use mboxo, but will be moving to mboxrd shortly.
- agwa 13y agoThat seems quite reasonable. Thanks for the info.