Browsing a big mailbox offline

[Robert Amesz]

Chris Liechti wrote:

> Sebastien SAUVAGE <nospam at sebsauvage.net> wrote in
> news:2002529-10584-626303 at foorum.com: 
>> I'm looking for a convenient way for browsing *offline* the
>> marvellous comp.lang.python archive (a nice 397 Mb mailbox file
>> available at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/  )
>> 
>> I found no news client capable of reading/importing a raw unix
>> mailbox. Does anybody know a news client capable of this ?
>> (platform : Windows)
> 
> XNews http://xnews.newsguy.com/ uses that format too. (create an
> archive and replace the file with yours) (very nice NNTP client)
> Opera, the mail client, just replace an existing mailbox file with
> yours. 

WARNING: Much as I love Xnews, it is NOT, I repeat NOT suitable as a 
general MBX-viewer. It is very choosy about the format of the 'from' 
lines which mark the start of a post, and if Xnews doesn't recognize 
the 'from'-lines it (almost?) always damages the file.

It wouldn't be very hard to write a small python script which puts the 
'from'-lines in the form Xnews _can_ handle, but that's another 
question altogeteher.

OTOH, 397 Meg is quite a mailbox; I wouldn't want to guess how long it 
will take to create the index file for that one...


Robert Amesz