Exporting to mBOX, winmail.dat, and de-duping

[Vinny]

Hi. I am trying to clean up my archived messages. I am finding that many of the emails in eaglefiler have a winmail.dat attachment. Is there a way to clean these up in bulk? I know there are tools that will allow you to view these attachments in OSX mail, so is my only option to import everything to Mail then import back to eaglefiler?

Next, i am trying to export emails to MBOX, but instead i end up getting a simpletextformat file where everything is in plaintext. Any idea why this is happening? I can get the MBOX file to appear for some mailboxes, but not others. How an i force the format? And if i can’t, is there a way to convert these to mbox?

Finally, is there a way to go through all archived mail and remove duplicates?

Thanks!

[Vinny]

Ok, so i figured out that the STF files are MBOX files and i just need to add the extension. Now that i have that, is there any way to retain the folder structure when i import back to mail? Or better yet, can i just export the entire library as on giant MBOX file?

[Michael_Tsai]

@Vinny

I am finding that many of the emails in eaglefiler have a winmail.dat attachment. Is there a way to clean these up in bulk?

EagleFiler does not have a way to modify the contents of e-mail messages that have already been imported.

@Vinny

I know there are tools that will allow you to view these attachments in OSX mail, so is my only option to import everything to Mail then import back to eaglefiler?

Could you explain more about what you’re trying to do? Are you trying to reduce the amount of disk space used?

@Vinny

Next, i am trying to export emails to MBOX, but instead i end up getting a simpletextformat file where everything is in plaintext.

EagleFiler mailbox files are natively in mbox format, so it’s not necessary to export if you want to import everything, although you can do that if you want to create a mbox file with only a subset of the messages. Apple Mail does not require the .mbox file extension in order to import. There’s more information about this here.

@Vinny

Finally, is there a way to go through all archived mail and remove duplicates?

There is a script to remove duplicate e-mails.

@Vinny

Now that i have that, is there any way to retain the folder structure when i import back to mail?

Apple Mail will do this automatically if you tell it to import a folder of mbox files. Please see this page.

@Vinny

Or better yet, can i just export the entire library as on giant MBOX file?

Putting everything in one giant mbox file would lose the folder structure. But if that’s what you want to do, you could select all the mbox files in EagleFiler’s source list, then select all the messages in the records list, and use the Export command. Then EagleFiler will generate a new mbox file with all of the selected messages.