Welcome to archmbox.

* DESCRIPTION

Archmbox is a simple email archiver written in perl; it parses one or more
mailboxes, select some or all messages and then perform specific actions on
the selected messages.

At this time archmbox supports mbox and mbx mailboxes.

Four different modes are available:

- list mode, which is useful to list all selected messages before 
  archmbox performs the real operations
- kill mode, if messages should be deleted from the mailbox(es) rather
  than archived
- archive mode, to archive selected messages in a different mailbox
- copy mode, to copy selected messages from a source mailbox(es) without
  modifying it

Messages selection is based upon a date criteria; an absolute date or a
days offset can be specified. It is also possible to refine the selection
using a time or regular expressions on the header fields of the message.

All archived messages are stored in a new mailbox with the same name of
the original one + .archived as extension (this is the default, but can be
changed); the archive mailbox can be saved in gz or bz2 compressed format
as well.

Please note that the archive mailbox's format is always mbox, regardless of
original mailbox's format. Moreover, mailboxes must be specified using the full
path.

Messages are appended to the archive mailbox to allow multiple executions
of the script against the same mailbox.

A detailed explanation of all options, with some usage examples, can be
found in the man page...

Archmbox has been successfully tested on the following platforms:

* Linux
* FreeBSD
* NetBSD
* OpenBSD
* MacOS X
* Windows (with CygWin)

* REQUIREMENTS

Archmbox is a perl based script with no additional module other than the
standard ones provided with normal perl distributions.  It has been developed
and tested with perl 5.6.1.  Archmbox also uses some standard shell binaries:
fuser or lsof, mv, rm, cat, cp, gzip.  bzip2 is needed only if you want to use
bzip compression with archive mailboxes.

Since version 4.5.0 archmbox supports mbx mailboxes, using an external converter
to handle that format. The following converters are supported at this time:
mbxcvt, mailutil. If you use a different converter and want archmbox to support
it, feel free to write me.

* NOTES AND ODDITIES (FAQs)

There are a few things to keep in mind when running archmbox. These are direct
consequences of application design, or simply odd results of things and can be
changed or fixed in future releases.

Archmbox uses a working directory to store temporary mailboxes. A default value
for that directory is hard coded in the script, but can be changed during the
configuration/installation process (see INSTALL for details).
It might happen that your mailboxes are too big for the partition holding this
temporary directory, or you might want to perform archiving on too much
mailboxes at the same time. In other words, you may run out of space.
Use the -t option to specify a suitable working directory at runtime.

If you see something strange in the messages counter when using list mode, or if
there are some differences in the mailbox dimensions (size/free space), keep in
mind that your mailbox may contain a special message (512 bytes in size) with
internal information related to the mailbox. This message is meaningless for
you, though archmbox recognizes it and lets you be aware of it. That message is
left untouched in your source mailbox; I know this should be done transparently.
Probably will.

A few words about locking. There has been a discussion about archmbox handles
file locking. The answer is simple: no mailbox is ever locked.
The reason behind this behavior is that I want archmbox to be as least invasive
as possible, so other kind of checks are performed to ensure that no data is
lost (mailbox has changed/mailbox is in use by another program). I will surely
add some locking mechanism in the future.

Red Hat users may experience problems with UTF-8 enabled locale. UTF-8 is not
yet supported, so if you encounter an endless list of errors while parsing
source mailbox(es), ensure that you don't have UTF-8 enable.
In order to fix the problem, you must edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n and
change the value of LOCALE from LOCALE="en_US.UTF-8" to LOCALE="en_US"

* CONTRIBUTIONS

Any kind of contribution to archmbox is really welcome. If you wish to package
archmbox for your favorite Linux distribution, or if you like to port it for a
different architecture, feel free to do it. I'd simply like to receive a note
to correctly update the information in this document and on the web site.

If you need some help, or just want a feature to be included in future releases
of archmbox, you can take advantage of the trackers available for the project.
They can be reached at the following url:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=65776

Patches and code contributions can be directly sent to myself.

* LINKS

Archmbox can be downloaded from:

http://adc-archmbox.sourceforge.net

* MAILING LISTS

There are three active mailing lists for archmbox:

+ announce	New releases and other important announcements
+ users		General discussions and users' experiences
+ devel		Developers community

You can get info about a list by sending a message with just the word
'help' as subject or in the body, to:

adc-archmbox-<list>-request@lists.sourceforge.net

A web interface is also available at:

https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/adc-archmbox-<list>

* CREDITS

Copyright (C) 2001-2004 Alessandro Dotti Contra

Code contributions:

* Alex Aminoff <alex_aminoff@alum.mit.edu>
* Brian Medley <bpm@4321.tv>
* Davor Ocelic <docelic@teleport.medri.hr>
* Fabrice Noilhan <fabrice-archmbox@noilhan.com>
* Jayanth Varma <jrvarma@iimahd.ernet.in>
* Juergen Edner <juergen.edner@telejeck.de>
* Nicolas Ecarnot <nicolas.ecarnot@accim.com>
* Paco Regodon <regodon@itcom.com>
* Scott Thompson <sco@openface.ca>

Packages and ports maintainers:

FreeBSD port:	Talal Al-Dik <tad@vif.com>

A full list of contributors can be found in the THANKS file...

For any question related to archmbox, feel free to contact me at:
adotti@users.sourceforge.net

Archmbox is free software, and it is distributed under the GPL
(please see the file COPYING for details).
