[Dovecot] dovecot mailbox to csv

John Heim jheim at math.wisc.edu
Thu Oct 5 00:20:11 UTC 2006


We (the Math department at the U of Wisconsin) recently switched over from 
another server to dovecot

One thing that a lot of people here do is set up an on-line form that sends 
them email. They use formmail for this. I have them edit their procmail 
config so that all the messages go into a particular mail folder.... So far 
so good.

With our old system, all messages in a folder were kept in a single file. 
With dovecot, they go into a couple of different directories.  This is 
problematic because we often need to convert the form field data to csv 
values so it can be imported into a spreadsheet. So a professor can create 
an on-line form and end up with the data from it in an Excell spreadsheet. 
Slick (when it works).

I understand that I can make dovecot store messages in a file by leaving the 
trailing slash off when specifying the folder name. Sample procmail segment:

:0:
* Subject:.*\[feedback\]
.feedback

But I can't get the feedback folder to show up in the list of IMAP folders 
in my mail client. I've tried Outlook Express and Thunderbird. If I put the 
slash at the end, it creates a .feedback folder and then I can see it in my 
mail client. But then I can't export it to cvs.

Anybody know why I can't see the .feeback folder? Or maybe somebody has a 
good way to get data from the body of messages stored in a dovecot folder, 
for example, .feedback/cur/ and .feedback/new/.




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