Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 22 Oct 1998 10:56:07 -0700 (PDT)
From:      Ken McGlothlen <mcglk@serv.net>
To:        "Barry A. Tigner" <tigner@pa.msu.edu>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   RE: mail format conversion/ transfer for VMS mail
Message-ID:  <199810221756.KAA23393@ralf.serv.net>
References:  <01BDFD9E.C5C516D0@eshop1.pa.msu.edu>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
tigner@pa.msu.edu (Barry A. Tigner) writes:

| Our current mail system is VMS mail. Do you know of any method or utility to
| move mail from VMS mail to a mail server on a FreeBSD system ? VMS mail
| allows mail to be stored in mail folders. When you are in VMS mail, there is
| NO command to perform a multiple FORWARD or SEMD or of all mail in a folder
| to another server.  We have hundreds of users who want to keep their old
| mail. Some of them have hundreds of mail folders accumulating over almost 2
| decades. Some of these users mail storage occupies as much as 50 to 100MB of
| storage.
| 
| Any suggestions you could make would be appreciated.

Back in days of yore (specifically, VMS 2.x), VMS mail folders were in ASCII
and easy to convert to Unix-style mail.  But that was a long time ago; now
they're in these indexed fixed-record-length files, and as you point out,
there's no way to do a multiple FORWARD or SEND.  And that's probably not what
you'd want to do anyway, because the headers would reflect the new origin
rather than the original sender.

Without access to a VMS system (and it has been a while), I can't actually
write a .COM file for you that would take care of this, but it should be
possible to save a list of the messages you have in a given folder to a text
file, and then have a .COM file run through that list, building *another* .COM
file that would go through the entire folder and save each message as text to a
temporary file, and then append that file onto an ASCII version of the folder
contents.  At the end of running that .COM file, you should have an ASCII
version, only with VMS-style headers.  You'll want to convert those to
something more Unixy---whether you want to do it with a .COM file, or with a
Perl script on the Unix box, is up to you.

Good luck.  If I can be of any assistance (after all, I still have friends in
the VMS world), let me know.

							---Ken

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?199810221756.KAA23393>