Fix invalid mail headers when moving from Thunderbird to IMAP (Python)

2008-08-30T20:08:02-07:00

Python recipe 576471 by Krys Wilken (cyrus, header, imap, invalid, mail, maildir, mbox, thunderbird).

Removes ">From" and "From " lines from mail headers.

Thunderbird adds invalid mail headers to it's local folders. Cyrus IMAP is strict about them. This script walks through all files in the given directories and removes any line that starts with ">From" or "From " (note the space and no colon).

Requires Python 2.5+.

extract emails from a mbox read on stdin (Python)

2013-09-07T10:24:17-07:00

Python recipe 576553 by Romain Dartigues (email, generators, mbox, read_only, stdin). Revision 2.

The Python mailbox.mbox class require a real file to initialize, which was an issue in my case. These simple functions let you iter through a mailbox read from a read-only file descriptor (like sys.stdin).

This script use the generators which were introduced in Python-2.2. Let me know if you are interested a similar functionnality on older Python versions.

Create a temporary mailbox (Python)

2013-04-29T14:04:20-07:00

Python recipe 578514 by Noufal Ibrahim (mail, mbox).

Generates a mailbox with lots of messages.

Fix mbox files after importing EML into TB using ImportExportTools (Python)

2010-05-02T13:21:00-07:00

Python recipe 577214 by Denis Barmenkov (eml, from, import, importexporttools, mbox, tb, thunderbird). Revision 2.

I've found a bug in import EML file into Thunderbird using ImportExportTools addon: when I import eml file into TB there are a 'From' line added to mbox followed with EML file contents. TB maintains right 'From' line for messages fetched from mailservers:

From - Tue Apr 27 19:42:22 2010

ImportExportTools formats this line wrong I suppose that used some system function with default specifier so I saw in mbox file:

From - Sat May 01 2010 15:07:31 GMT+0400 (Russian Daylight Time)

So there are two errors: 1) sequence 'time year' broken into 'year time' 2) extra trash with GMT info along with time zone name

This prevents the mbox file parsing using Python standard library (for sample) because there are a hardcoded regexp for matching From line (file lib/mailbox.py, class UnixMailbox):

_fromlinepattern = r"From \s*[^\s]+\s+\w\w\w\s+\w\w\w\s+\d?\d\s+" \
                   r"\d?\d:\d\d(:\d\d)?(\s+[^\s]+)?\s+\d\d\d\d\s*$"

Attached script fixes incorrect From lines so parsing those mboxes using Python standard library will become ok.

Most viewed recipes tagged "mbox"

Fix invalid mail headers when moving from Thunderbird to IMAP (Python)

extract emails from a mbox read on stdin (Python)

Create a temporary mailbox (Python)

Fix mbox files after importing EML into TB using ImportExportTools (Python)