Creating a Mhonarc archive from MS Outlook emails

["Tim Gwinn" <tim@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

 

I wanted to share my tale of converting email from MS-Outlook into a Mhonarc archive, in hopes that it may be useful to someone else. (As I found out, being a Windows-based user can have its drawbacks.)

 

My situation was one of running a Listserv list hosted by Lsoft, and after several months realizing that it would nice to have Google-searchable web-based archives. Mhonarc seemed like a great product, but the months of emails I had acquired were in Outlook 2000, which uses a proprietary format, not the "mbox" format desired by Mhonarc. Likewise, Listserv archives are not in mbox format. (The logfiles can be converted, apparently, but by default, the logfiles do not have full header information, and on top of that, require one to write their own conversion program.)

 

After some online searching and experimenting, I was unable to find any non-commercial utility to convert Outlook email files directly into mbox format. (They only seemed to exist for Outlook Express -> mbox, such as DbxConv.)  

 

I found that Mozilla Thunderbird (build 0.4) used an mbox format email file, and it allowed one to directly import existing email from Outlook or Outlook Express. Woot! 

 

However, I was disappointed to find that while the imported email from Outlook retained its full header information, it lost any of its HTML formatting in the message bodies.

 

A little more experimenting showed me that if I imported email from Outlook to Outlook Express, I could then import from Outlook Express to Thunderbird and it would retain all the HTML formatting in the emails. But, apparently in the Outlook to OE step, much of the header information was lost, such that Mhonarc could perform no message threading, aside from matching the Subject.

 

So, both import methods had something the other didn't.

 

I then devised a nefarious kludge to combine the best of both worlds:

1) Import from the Outlook 2000 into Thunderbird, using Thunderbirds import utility.

2) Import from Outlook 2000 to Outlook Express using OE's import utility.

3) Import from OE to Thunderbird into another folder, using Thunderbirds import utility.

4) Create two separate Mhonarc archives using the two mbox files from the two imports into Thunderbird.

 

The OE archive would have all the HTML formatting in the msg files, but the thread index files would not be correct. So, I simply copied the date, thread and author index files from the Outlook2000 archive over the ones in the OE archive. That resulted in archives that retained both 1) complete HTML formatting and 2) full threading information. Viola!

 

Subsequent to that initial transition, I have been receiving all new emails directly into Thunderbird, and '-add'ing those emails in batches to the existing archives. (Again, being Windows-based and not having direct access to mbox files on my hosted website, I have to do this on my PC, and then use Frontpage to shuttle the changed files to my web host.)

 

Perhaps someone will tell me there is a much easier way, but at least this worked and might be useful to someone else.

 

My archives are at: http://www.panmere.com/rosen/mhout/maillist.html

Mozilla Thiunderbird: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/

DbxConv: http://people.freenet.de/ukrebs/

 

Regards,

Tim