Exporting Netscape Messenger to HTML

Chris Carlin asks: "I've been useing Netscape Messenger for years as my main email client, and I think it works great for my needs. Anyway, I tend to be a packrat with email and save just about everything. As a result I now have thousands of messages organized and taking up much space on my hard drive and I'd just plain like to get the stuff off my disk onto CD. I'd like to export in such a way that I won't need Communicator to read them at a later date, which brings me (finally) to my question: since Netscape doesn't seem to have a way of exporting all messages to a tree of directories of HTML files, is there a program that could? What else could I do with them that would preserve the oragnization but not require that I keep a copy of Netscape on the computer forever if I want to have access to the email?"

Std Unix format

[Andy Dodd]

AFAIK Netscape and Eudora use the standard Unix mailbox format, in addition to just about every non-MS maler on the planet. (Zmail is an exception, it needs a simple conversion util to "massage" the mailbox format.) The only thing you have to watch out for is CR CR/LF conversion if you're using Eudora. I'm not sure how Netscape handles CR/LF stuff. It might handle it in the default method for its platform, or it might do it the same way across all platforms.

Use IMAP + hypermail

[Tor]

Use the 'imap' package for Linux to provide both imap2 and pop3 services. With any mail client that supports the IMAP protocol, you can create folders on the server and copy your mail to those. (On the server, these mailboxes will appear as regular UNIX/UUCP mailboxes, all except the inbox will be in /home//mail/ by default).

In the case of Netscape for UNIX, you do not have to go through that step, as its mailboxes are already in UUCP format.

Then use the package 'hypermail' to convert these mailboxes to HTML pages.

Another alternative would be to use the MH 'inc' command, to separate each mail into a separate MH-style file, and perhaps do a 'scan +folder > indexfile'.

In the same vein ...

[Etyenne]

I'm stuck i a similar situation, except that it's an MS hell. I have used Internet Mail 3.0 (the mailer for IE 3) for about 2 years now, and would seriously like to move all that accumulated mail to something else. A lot of research have'nt turned out anything that could converte their proprietary format (a kind of database format where the index and the data are kept separately in no particuliar order) for mail box to something else. If you know of a trick that could do it (I am especially looking at converting all this mail to plain ASCII), please let me know.

And don't say I should'nt have used it in the first place; I already know it, that's why I'm moving.

Thanx !

Etyenne

Shouldn't be too hard

[h2odragon]

A quick look at my netscape (4.08 - Linux) mail folders makes 'em look like fairly standard Unix mailbox files to me. Messages separated by a line beginning with "From ", and such. I'm sure there's just tons of options for translating those into any format you'd like; nor should it be hard to hack up something to do *exactly* what you want in Python, Perl, or whatever the language of your choice happens to be.

Have a look at Hypermail for nice HTML translating and threading, that's just the first thing that comes to mind.