Subject: mbx mailbox format

From: Lai Yiu Fai <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 16:35:43 +0800

Do anyone know where can I find the specification of mbx mailbox format?
I would like to write scripts to convert back to Berkeley-style mailbox.
Though mbxcvt can do the work, it is not designed for mass conversion and
the speed is really slow.  I found that mbx mainly consists of two parts,
the header in the beginning of the mailbox file and a line of header
information for each message, do anyone know exactly the syntax and
definition of these headers?

Rgds,
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Lai Yiu Fai                       |  Tel.:       (852) 2358-6202
Information Technology Services   |  Fax.:       (852) 2358-2737
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The Hong Kong University of       |  Clear Water Bay,
Science & Technology              |  Kowloon, Hong Kong.
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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2000 10:10:12 -0800 (PST)

> I would like to write scripts to convert back to Berkeley-style mailbox.

I can't help but wonder -- why do you want to do such a thing?  That's a big
step backward.

> the speed is really slow.

The reason why mbxcvt is slow is twofold: per-message append (which will be
solved when I implement multi-append in c-client) and the necessity to check
every line of the message to see if it might look like a "From " Berkeley
internal header line.  The leading ">" is inserted only if it the line matches
the complete syntax for a Berkeley internal header; unlike certain stupid
programs it won't insert a ">" just because the line begins with "From ".

The per-message append is by far the major slowdown, and is the motivation
behind multi-append.  It will happen soon.