hoehrmann / agent2mbox Goto Github PK

So,

  Mail clients. I have yet to discover why it is, but people seem unable
to make good ones. I've been reasonably happy with mine, but it's time
to fight back against the netiquette haters with better software. Since
there is no better software, I've started working on my own every now
and then. Eventually that will mean migration, and having seen that one
coming, I've reverse engineered the file format my client uses every so
and so often. There are some tools and there is some documentation out
there, but they are outdated and some come in forms like Delphi code. In
my case, also wanted to extract information others can probably do with-
out, and of course I wanted to obtain it reasonably properly so I don't
run into any surprises, so this wasn't entirely trivial. The basic form
is quite simple, but the part following the message list is weird, I've,
well, normalized variable length fields and guessed based on what you'd
find the length of the not-yet-normalized variable lengths fields until
everything parsed okay. It's likely not complete, but works for me.

I used the Data::ParseBinary module which in turn is based on the Python
PyConstructs module. The documentation for the Perl module isn't great,
but the module as a whole was okay to work with, certainly better than
having `read`s all over and then trying to `unpack` each little bit into
variables. The main gotcha I encountered was that you can only have one
`then` argument to the If function, but you get not proper error message
for that. Unrelated to the module, if vec() warned when you use it on a
hash reference rather than a string, that would have helped aswell... I
made no effort to name things sensibly, this is just how it has grown.