Mailbox and notebook file convertor Rick Troth BMC ) Copyright 1993, 1996, Richard M. Troth, all rights reserved. This is the README file for MAILCONVERT. See the supplied HELP file for command syntax. TRANSFER YOUR UNIX MAILBOX/NOTEBOOK FILES IN BINARY. Something that I had hoped would make it into MAILCONVERT before the cutting of the '96 VM Workshop tape was that it would accept UNIX mailbox files as text or binary. VM doesn't have the problem; some UNIX mail user agents do (like Pine). So for the UNIX --> CMS conversion, the UNIX mailboxes should be in either form (ASCII or binary) but they're can't and have to be binary. Another addition would be to get MAILCONVERT to use the MAKETEXT pipelines stage instead of ye olde A2E stage. Maybe later. An interesting thing happened when, at Rice, I was trying to be a good little UNIX Sys Admin and use a UNIX mail user agent to read my e-mail: I found myself going back to CMS (Richard Schafer's MAILBOOK) because none of the UNIX mail tools were nearly as good. (now, Elm came close to being useable, and I have yet to try 'exmh', which is reported to be excellent, but) Pine and Z-Mail were both rather unwieldy compared to MAILBOOK on CMS. (and Schafer *still* doesn't pay me for these endorsements of his product) ;-) So MAILCONVERT will probably be used in both directions, to move mail from VM to UNIX and to move mail from UNIX back to VM. Strict interpretation of RFC 822 defines the break between the header and the body of each mail message as CR/LF/CR/LF, *not* a blank line, but a truly EMPTY line. This means that that blank line between header and body must not have any TABs or SPACEs in it. The CMS minidisk filesystem does not provide for truly empty lines; empty lines in CMS (on minidisks) have at least a space character. (Pipelines and SFS, however, do allow null records) This is why you'll have to the UNIX mailbox files as binary. I had no other way to get the CR/LF/CR/LF in exactly that form. [sigh] Pine is still not happy with UNIX mbox output from MAILCONVERT. If someone can figure out exactly what Pine is displeased about, please send me mail. Updated versions of MAILCONVERT can likely be found at http://casita.houston.tx.us/~troth/software/mailconvert.vmarc or http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~troth/software/mailconvert.vmarc Happy converting! -- Rick Troth , Houston, Texas, USA http://casita.houston.tx.us/~troth/