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How to work around an elm to Mail import problem Apps
I was trying to import messages to Mail from the Unix program elm, and I ran into a few problems. At first, when I tried to import the elm mailbox only the first message would be imported. I fixed this by opening the mailbox file in BBEdit Lite and saving it as a different filename. I'm not exactly sure what this did, but it allowed me to import about half of the message.

To fix the rest, I went into ~/Library -> Mail -> Mailboxes, and control clicked the imported mailbox and selected "Show Package Contents." From there, I opened the "mbox" file in BBEdit and removed all of the '>' characters from the beginnings of "From:" lines. After this, all of the messages imported without a hitch.

So if you're having trouble importing mailboxes, you might want to try this.

[Editor's note: I have no idea if anyone will find this useful or not, but I figure if you're stuck trying to import a mailbox, having this knowledge around can't hurt...]
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formail can help
Authored by: Mark A. Matthews on Dec 14, '02 01:10:42PM

You might try crunching the elm mailbox file through formail to clean it up before importing to Mail. 'formail -ds < oldmailbox >> newmailbox'.

I seem to recall that Elm sometimes has problems with erroneous Content-Length: headers. I've been able to work around such problems by editing the mailbox and removing all the Content-Lenght: headers, which causes the program reading the mailbox to depending on the blank line/From<space> sequence that Berkeley mailbox format employs for message separation in the mailbox file.

Various mail handler deal with the existence of the word from at the begining of a line within a message by escaping it with an inserted '>', thus the '>From' you see in the messages. However, if it's escaping ^From<colon>, as well as ^From<space>, then that's a bug.



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