MBOX imports - where is the message date?

DEVONthink Tips
#1

I have quite a lot of text files that are archives from a mailman mailing list.
These files conform the the standard “mbox” format for unix mail files (although much header info has been cleaned out.

DTO allows me to import these files (albeit one at a time) and successfully extract each message, sender and subject.

However it doesn’t extract the message date. All the imported messages have the file creation date, not the actual message date.

I can only think this is a bug given the successful identification of each message and the extraction of the sender and subject.

For a small number of messages this is no big deal but I have some 40,000 and not being able to sort my search results by message date makes them very tiresome. Is there a fix for this?

#2

There is a known issue with non-standard date formats (and some mailing lists use them) that the Pantomime library can’t parse. I have fixed this for version 2 but since the fix needs Leopard it won’t be available in version 1.
Also in version 2 you can drag all these messages in one go into a database.

#3

Thanks annard,

I look forward to version 2.
In the meantime I discovered EagleFiler handles the mboxs just fine.
So for this particular use, I can happily use EagleFiler for these particular archives.

#4