[TriLUG] Retrieve emails from old server

[Sean Korb via TriLUG]

Does the administrator access allow you to archive as pst?  There is a
wonderful utility to convert pst files to mbox and then you can use
Unix stuff to read the mbox files.   It's nice to have everything as
text and use grep and awk.  I even use alpine, a version of pine to
manage my old pst mail in mbox format.  It's old so it's not often
used but it is a *stable* format and you can always read text no
matter where everything else goes.

*Anyway* I have a non-sequitur for saving email.  I used to administer
a Sun E3500 that I used to grab a Solaris X86 email server database
from. The x86 Solaris box used a BSD database which was great, but the
endiens are wrong between x86 and Sparc.  So I wrote a Perl program to
turn the BSD tuples into text and stuff them back into a Sparc BSD
database on the other machine... or a Netscape email server on an
E220.  The memory fades and I am pretty sure I gave the project to a
much more talented administrator to do the actual conversion but it
was interesting how unexpectedly complicated that process was.  I
should have used Perl to swap the endians in the data structure
itself, it probably would have worked just fine.

sean

On 7/22/19, John Mitchell via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 1:50 PM Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> Can you contact the hosting service and ask them to zip the whole mail
>> directory? Maybe they'll charge for it, but that's reasonable.
>>
>
> Oh, that's one I didn't think of, it's worth a try!  :)
>
>  does the new service allow for backups?
>
> Yes, archiving of all emails was one thing we wanted with the new service.
> (also satisfies a legal requirement for the emails).
>
> john mitchell
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-- 
Sean Korb spkorb at gmail.com http://spkorb.org (est 1994)
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers." -P. Picasso