The Spam

Sadly enough I didn't think of spam as a large issue back in 2000.
Now (2006) it has become enormous. So I removed Postbus.PAB from
this distro. Now we're version 0.52 (what a major development
effort).


THE SITUATION

One of these realy annoying things of moving from Windows to Linux,
or even working with either two of them (work, home in my situation ;-))
is the conversion of Microsoft documents and files to my Linux preferreds
and vise versa.

From Linux to Microsoft poses the least problems, because Microsoft is
generally handy enough to provide some import functionality. The other
way around is where the problems begin.

First of all, Microsoft doesn't supply information to write import filters
for you programs, unless (of course) you're willing to pay a lot for it (which
we generally don't want). So importing from Microsoft application is not an
easy job; Especially with the newer products like Outlook Express 4/5, it's
nearly impossible to even export your folders with emails to other programs
(except of course Microsoft programs).

My problems began when I wanted to get rid of Windows at home. After 2 years
working with it (having Linux as a network server), annoying Windows begins
to get really unstable (I hadn't been able to burn CD's already for over a
year). Now I decided was the right time to move to Linux. I bought me a 
Slackware 7 distribution with StarOffice 5.1a for Windows compatibility.
Then I fdisked the Windows PC and installed Linux on it. After some days work
it runs really good under the KDE desktop.

StarOffice works fine, but not for browsing and email. For email I use Kmail,
that I find very usefull (despite the ommission of hierarchical folders and
a good connection/interaction with kab (K Address Book)) (I think this should
be worked on :-)). But now the problem arose:

         What to do with the old Outlook Express 5.0 folders??

I wanted to keep them and resolve the documents inside them.

THE SOLUTION

I decided to re-engineer the file format of OE5 to see if I could resolve
my messages. And indeed I succeded :-)). 

Although Microsoft doesn't give away their file formats, of course they can't
be that difficult to understand. Indeed, the Microsoft .DBX format for the
OE5 folders proved to be not to difficult. 

- Basicly, it consists of some header information with (most important) an 24 bits
  pointer to the beginning of a index list of the messages inside the folder.
- This index list, consists of a lot of useless (for our purpose) information about
  the messages and pointers to the beginning of the messages (24 bits).
- Each message turns out to be a single linked list of message blocks (32 bits 
  pointers).

When I re-engineered this information, I could write the conversion filter. It's
called 

      oe5_to_mbox

mbox directing to the (old) UNIX mbox format. Well, it doesn't exactly convert
to this mbox format, but it is good enough for KMail. And it uses only the information
from the .DBX file that it really needs. The bottom line is that you don't have to
fully understand the .DBX format to write the conversion. 

I think it can be used as an import filter for KMail. That should piss Bill off,
free software that's really good, moving to the import of Microsoft formats!

Not export though. But who wants to export from Linux to Microsoft Windows? ;-) 
And Microsoft will have some import filter based on text files (you can read 
single emails if you really want). 

ALPHA STATUS

Although I used this little peace of software to convert my own OE5 folders,
it hasn't been widely tested. So, although I'm pretty sure it will support
most conversions, it should be considerd an Alpha product. 
I'm open for response and questions.

COPYRIGHT

GPL2 (as always).

Netherlands, Warnsveld, 23-6-2000,
Hans Dijkema
h.dijkema@hum.org



         





