Question

I have a single spool mbox file that was created with evolution, containing a selection of emails that I wish to print. My problem is that the emails are not placed into the mbox file chronologically. I would like to know the best way to place order the files from first to last using bash, perl or python. I would like to oder by received for files addressed to me, and sent for files sent by me. Would it perhaps be easier to use maildir files or such?

The emails currently exist in the format:

From [e-mail] Fri Aug 12 09:34:09 2005 Message-ID: <[e-mail]> Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:34:09 +0900 From: me <[e-mail]> User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (Windows/20050716) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: someone <[e-mail]> Subject: Re: (no subject) References: <[e-mail]> In-Reply-To: <[e-mail]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Status: RO X-Status:  X-Keywords:                  X-UID: 371 X-Evolution-Source: imap://[e-mail]/ X-Evolution: 00000002-0010  Hey  the actual content of the email  someone wrote:  > lines of quotedtext 

I am wondering if there is a way to use this information to easily reorganize the file, perhaps with perl or such.

Answer 1

This is how you could do it in python:

#!/usr/bin/python2.5 from email.utils import parsedate import mailbox  def extract_date(email):     date = email.get('Date')     return parsedate(date)  the_mailbox = mailbox.mbox('/path/to/mbox') sorted_mails = sorted(the_mailbox, key=extract_date) the_mailbox.update(enumerate(sorted_mails)) the_mailbox.flush()