At 01:07 PM 2/25/98 -0500, Christine Fontaine wrote:
What I have:
A web site with a cgi-bin, with FTP access (no Unix shell)
Eudora mailbox on my computer's hard drive (running Win 95) that I
wish to convert to a web archive
What I'd like to do:
Have all the messages coming in to that Eudora mailbox added to the
archive. Can I do this? How do I go about doing this?
Yes, this is doable.
One way to accomplish this is to run MHonArc on your Windows 95 machine and
then upload MHonArc's output .html files via FTP to the WWW server.
In outline ...
Do once:
1. Install Perl on your Windows 95 machine.
2. Install MHonArc on your Windows 95 machine.
Do periodically:
3. Arrange for your Eudora mailbox(es) to get processed by MHonArc.
4. FTP the results of #3 from the Windows 95 machine to the Unix WWW
server.
#1 is beyond the scope of MHonArc. If you get a recent Win32 Perl
installed and working, MHonArc makes no extra demands from Perl.
There are some messages in the MHonArc list archive about how to do #2
under Windows NT. Those also generally apply to Windows 95. #4 is
platform independent. #3 can be interesting. I'll take a shot at periodic
Eudora in.mbx conversion here.
a. Eudora (through 3.0) receives incoming messages via a POP3 download
into an in.mbx file. That file is compatible with MHonArc. (It's possible
to use Eudora filters to route incoming messages elsewhere than in.mbx, but
I'll ignore that.) Eudora appends new messages to the tail end of in.mbx.
b. If you transfer messages out of in.mbx using Eudora, including
deletions to the trash, make sure to "compact mailboxes" before running
MhonArc since the message is not actually deleted from in.mbx when it is
transferred. Until compacting, Eudora marks "deletions" in a companion
in.toc file that MHonArc can't use.
c. If you want a cumulative MHonArc archive, i.e. something that shows
every message ever received by Eudora, you would use MHonArc's "-add"
option to take new messages in the in.mbx and append them to the current
MhonArc archive. MHonArc is intelligent enough to avoid adding the same
message twice to its archive, so you can just do -add without worrying if
in.mbx contains messages that MHonArc has seen before.
d. If instead you want an exact mirror of only the messages in in.mbx,
you do not use -add. You let MHonArc generate an entirely new archive each
time it runs.
e. (Platform independent?) MHonArc will run faster if you periodically
move older messages (that MHonArc has already seen) out of in.mbx. It
reads every message in the file every time you run it. To protect against
the possibility of data loss, I'd move the in.mbx messages into another
Eudora folder and keep it backed up somewhere in case I ever needed the
exact message headers (MHonArc tosses some of them) or I needed to
regenerate the MHonArc archive because of a problem in it.
f. To execute MHonArc you can run it manually (.bat file with all
arguments for convenience) or trigger it from a scheduler (again probably
with a .bat file). If using a scheduler (Win95 Plus? IE4 add-in?), I
suggest scheduling execution only when Eudora will never be executing at
the same time. Both programs need to use Eudora's in.mbx file. (MHonArc
reads, Eudora reads and writes.) MHonArc is designed to be well behaved
for input file access when run under Unix. Win95 and Perl for Win32 are
not as well explored with MHonArc's concurrent file access protection.
Good luck!
-- SP
