Jason explained,
I thought "sorted by date" was a big clue as to what I wanted to do! Just
in case it's still not clear. I would like to *sequence* my mail by date.
Thank you. Yes, it was a big clue, and that's why I said that the Thursday
post (yours) was probably about sequencing.
So you asked,
| I have a large archive of mail that I access via IMAP. I have been merging
| mail from various other archives and systems I have used over time and
| would like to get the IMAP archives sorted by date. Currently they are
| sorted by the order in which they were added to the archive.
| What this means is that when I want to go back to a certain period in time,
| I have to select sort by date in my mail client which as can be imagined
| takes a long time to load the message headers of several thousand messages
| via IMAP and then sort them.
| What I need to do is run a sort on these messages on the server side during
| the night. Has anybody done anything like this?
And I see that I shot my mouth off too much when I said I had answers to
offer once the ambiguity was cleared up, because your question is specific
to IMAP and I had forgotten that. So I defer to Bart Schaefer.
If your client can deal with an mbox on the server, then I would have had an
answer for sequencing the messages. But Bart's response opens a door:
: If you physically reorder the messages "behind the server's back" the best
: that will happen is that the server will have to reassign all the UIDs;
: the worst is that it'll break entirely.
: The only correct way to do this within the IMAP protocol is to copy the
: messages one by one in the desired order into a new mailbox, then delete
: the old mailbox and rename the new one. I say "one by one" because if you
: supply a range of numbers to the COPY command, the IMAP server is allowed
: to decide the order in which it copies them, which defeats your purpose.
One way that has worked for me, dealing with mboxes rather than IMAP folders,
has been to save each message to a file named for the date +%s (GNU date sup-
ports that) equivalent of its timestamp. Now, I don't know whether, when you
say "sorted by date," Jason, you mean by date sent rather than date received.
[Since they are merges from many delivery locations, they didn't start out
in order of receipt.] If you want to sort them by date sent, that has an
inherent complication: senders often have their system time and date set
wrong, or their mail clients use the time zone indicator, an invalid one, or
a mnemonic for the time zone that matches that for another time zone nearer
you. Thus the date sent information is often unreliable or inaccurate. (It
wasn't a problem for me, because I was re-sorting by the date and time of
receipt per the From_ line to get messages back into their original sequence
of arrival after I had moved them around, so I was taking dates and times out
of the From_ lines, All the From_ lines were added by the local host, so
they were in a consistent format.)
So, after saving every message to a file named for the number of seconds from
the Unix epoch to its own date, I let the shell sequence them with
cat working_directory/* > new_folder
While you would re-feed them to IMAP to get them renumbered in the order you
want (as Bart described) rather than concatenating them to a new mbox as I
did, perhaps this can still be of some value for your situation.
Good luck.
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