in reply to Parsing Pegasus email boxes

Hi jonadab,

You certainly have a good knowledge of the Pegasus product, and I see you use it also

There is not a large overlap between Perl users and pmail users, but there may be a few. I have used Pegasus Mail myself in the past, before I learned Gnus, and might be interested in collaborating with you on creating a parser for pmail folders.

Possibly working with Mark Overmeer , in extending the Mail::Box module to include using Pegasus mailboxes

For just parsing, you can completely ignore the .pmi files; those are indices. (They might improve performance, but it's probably not worth figuring out a second file format just for that.)

Yes, they are of no use really, outside of Pegasus (the product). Also, when you delete a email msg , like many methods with deleting, the data is only flagged as being deleted and has not been physically removed. You need to 'rebuild' the mailbox, which physically removes the dead data and rebuilds the index

I have a number of pmail folders myself and, as I said, have some interest in working on a perl module for this. I am very unlikely to get around to doing it on my own, however.

Possibly you would be interested in working on the contribution, if Mark wants to extend the module ?

As far as a formal specification of the format, I do not believe one has ever existed.

In theory at least, I don't think it is _too_ hard to work out the layout, I checked some of it out (see my other reply)

I suppose that David Harris is using the source code or comments in the source code as his documentation, and he is unwilling to let out the source without an NDA. (This also is why there is no Linux port. David is ammenable in theory to the idea of someone doing such a port, but they would have to sign an NDA and meet other criteria. An unusual attitude for a freeware developer, perhaps, but Pegasus is of unusual quality, as well.

Pegasus is a very good product, especially considering it has been around for so long as freeware. David only gets an 'income' from people who buy the manuals, so I don't know how he keeps 'bread on the table', so to speak. :)

Thanks,

Peter