should archivemail strip X-Keywords headers from mbox? - Mutt

Troy Piggins writes:

> I have a cron job to archive mail every month. All mailboxes are
> mbox format. The script calls archivemail[1], which takes
> messages older than certain date and moves them to a gzipped
> mbox.
>
> What I'm finding, though, is after it's finished the more recent
> messages left in the original mbox no longer have their
> X-Keywords: $Label1 headers (eg "Tags" in Thunderbird, after
> archivemail is run the messages no longer have their tag colours).

You must be using it to archive your mail as an IMAP mailstore. You are
using UW-IMAP which stores IMAP keywords in this header. UW-IMAP must
silently remove this header because it's for its internal use only, and IMAP
clients never see it.

> Anyone know of an alternative to archivemail?

There is no alternative to archive mail as IMAP mail, that will preserve
this header, because, as far as any IMAP client is concerned, it does not
exist.

You will have to use archivemail to pull mail from the mbox files directly,
and deal with any locking issues between archivemail and UW-IMAP. That's
the only way to preserve this header.


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* Sam is quoted & my replies are inline below :
> Troy Piggins writes:
>
>> I have a cron job to archive mail every month. All mailboxes are
>> mbox format. The script calls archivemail[1], which takes
>> messages older than certain date and moves them to a gzipped
>> mbox.
>>
>> What I'm finding, though, is after it's finished the more recent
>> messages left in the original mbox no longer have their
>> X-Keywords: $Label1 headers (eg "Tags" in Thunderbird, after
>> archivemail is run the messages no longer have their tag colours).
>
> You must be using it to archive your mail as an IMAP mailstore. You are
> using UW-IMAP which stores IMAP keywords in this header. UW-IMAP must
> silently remove this header because it's for its internal use only, and IMAP
> clients never see it.

Correct - the T'bird clients access the mboxes via IMAP. Sorry I
didn't mention that.

>> Anyone know of an alternative to archivemail?
>
> There is no alternative to archive mail as IMAP mail, that will preserve
> this header, because, as far as any IMAP client is concerned, it does not
> exist.

What's confusing me here, though, is that if I use mutt, or
indeed simply open the mbox with vim, I can see the X-Keywords:
header in the messages. Doesn't that mean it "exists"?

> You will have to use archivemail to pull mail from the mbox files directly,
> and deal with any locking issues between archivemail and UW-IMAP. That's
> the only way to preserve this header.

Not sure what you mean by "directly". archivemail is run on the
same machine the mboxes are on. From the man page:

"When reading an mbox-format mailbox, archivemail will create a
lockfile with the extension .lock so that procmail will not
deliver to the mailbox while it is being processed. It
will also create an advisory lock on the mailbox using
flock..."

Or should I stop the IMAP server completely while archivemail is
running?

Thanks Sam.

--
Troy Piggins ,-O (o- O All your sigs are belong to us.
http://piggo.com/~troy O ) //\ O
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* Blinky the Shark is quoted & my replies are inline below :
> Troy Piggins wrote:
>> I have a cron job to archive mail every month. All mailboxes are mbox
>> format. The script calls archivemail[1], which takes messages older
>> than certain date and moves them to a gzipped mbox.
>>
>> What I'm finding, though, is after it's finished the more recent
>> messages left in the original mbox no longer have their X-Keywords:
>> $Label1 headers (eg "Tags" in Thunderbird, after archivemail is run
>> the messages no longer have their tag colours).
>
> It seems Thunderbirdies are kind of their own insulated group, but do I
> read you correctly that they call headers "Tags"?

Not quite. You can 'tag' messages 'Important', 'Work',
'Personal' and so on. All this really does is add a header to
the message 'X-Keywords: $Label1', 'X-Keywords: $Label2' etc.
You can add your own too. Each one has a different colour.

I should clarify, TB2 calls them 'tags', TB1 calls them 'labels'.

I didn't think this was relevant, and didn't post to a specific
TB group, because I thought it more an archivemail issue. I
posted also to mutt group, because I thought there was a good
chance mutt users may implement archivemail or similar.

--
Troy Piggins ,-O (o- O All your sigs are belong to us.
http://piggo.com/~troy O ) //\ O
RLU#415538 `-O V_/_ OOO
hackerkey://v3sw5HPUhw5ln4pr6OSck1ma9u6LwXm5l6Di2e6t5MGSRb8OTen4g7OPa3Xs7MIr8p7