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Identifying the content of Email Mailboxes
| One line summary | A single mailbox file (.mbox/.mbx/.pst) can consists of a lot of email messages with or without attachments and we want to identify them. |
| Detailed description | The main focus will be on an Eudora mailbox. Eudora uses an mboxo variation which is one of the mbox family's. Eudora separates out attachments embedded in the message, storing the attachments as separate individual files in one folder. We want to know how many message there are in the mailbox, how many attachments, which fileformats the attachments have, etc. MBOX File Specifications  We have the same problem with .pst files (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folder File Format). Each PST file represents a message store that contains an arbitrary hierarchy of Folder objects, which contains Message objects, which can contain Attachment objects. Information about Folder objects, Message objects, and Attachment objects are stored in properties, which collectively contain all of the information about the particular item. Outlook Personal Folders (.pst) File Format specifictions The main reason why we want to know this at this moment is because we are running tests on different preservation tools for E-mail (like the PeDALS Email Extractor , CERP Email Preservation Parser and other tools) and it is a lot of work to check manually if all messages and attachments are processed by the tool. |
| Issue champion | Mette van Essen |
| Possible approaches | MESSAGES: 1. Read mbox protocol 2. Identify start + end email messages (bytes) 3. Count them 4. Automate 5. Compare ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ATTACHEMENTS: 1. Identify attachment sequencing 2. Count ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Other Solutions: - Normalize to IMAP - Parse in email readers (thunderbird) - Apache virtual file system |
| Context | NANETH |
| AQuA Solutions | Identifying the content of Email Mailboxes - Solution |
| Collections | Email Mailbox Collections |