UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

HP-UX B11.23 ia64

I have a users mail inbox in /var/mail
I want to send all the mail there to another address (an Exchange address).
At the Exchange address, I want it to appear as the original separate emails, with attachments in their original form (e.g. still MIME encoded).

Is that possible, and if so how?

Lisa

not a bump but to supply more information -

I did try reading the mail as with mailx -f or mail and then tried to send the output (the mail itself) to mailx with the destination of the other user but that didn't work - or it didn't work in a timely manner so I cntl-C
but that is the kind of thing I'm trying to do.

You'll probably want to write a script to parse the mbox files and then send each. I've done that in the past, but I don't remember specifics. I believe that each message begins with "^From", so you could start by trying to parse along those lines. If you know if, perl would be a good tools for this job.

Good luck!

hmm - that sounds as if it would work for instream messages but I'm not sure attachements would look like attachments at the target. Thanks for the idea.

Since the attachments are stored inline, it shouldn't make a difference. I'd recommend a test, of course, but since they'll get delivered via smtp to the desired target, the recipient won't be any the wiser.

#!/bin/perl -w

#########################################
#split_mbox.pl
#
#This script is desined to split an mbox
#file into individual message files.
#########################################

my $infile="/path/to/infile";
my $outdir="/path/to/outdir";
my $fcnt=1;
my @fcontents;

open(INFILE, "$infile") || die "Can't open $infile: $!";
@fcontents=<INFILE>;
close(INFILE);

foreach $line(@fcontents) {
my $outfile="$outdir/$fcnt";
print "$outfile\n";
if($line =~ /^From /) {
print "$line\n";
close(WRITE);
$fcnt++;
$outfile="$outdir/$fcnt";
open(WRITE, ">$outfile") || die "Can't open $outfile: $!";
print WRITE $line;
} else {
print WRITE $line;
}
}


Use it or not, as you like...

very interesting - we'll see if we can adapt for our purpose
thanks