How can I reorder an mbox file chronologically?

Question

I have a single spool mbox file that was created with evolution, containing a selection of emails that I wish to print. My problem is that the emails are not placed into the mbox file chronologically. I would like to know the best way to place order the files from first to last using bash, perl or python. I would like to oder by received for files addressed to me, and sent for files sent by me. Would it perhaps be easier to use maildir files or such?

The emails currently exist in the format:

From x@blah.com Fri Aug 12 09:34:09 2005
Message-ID: <42FBEE81.9090701@blah.com>
Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 09:34:09 +0900
From: me <x@blah.com>
User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.6 (Windows/20050716)
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: someone <someone@hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: (no subject)
References: <BAY101-F9353854000A4758A7E2CCA9BD0@phx.gbl>
In-Reply-To: <BAY101-F9353854000A4758A7E2CCA9BD0@phx.gbl>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Status: RO
X-Status: 
X-Keywords:                 
X-UID: 371
X-Evolution-Source: imap://x+blah.com@blah.com/
X-Evolution: 00000002-0010

Hey

the actual content of the email

someone wrote:

> lines of quotedtext

I am wondering if there is a way to use this information to easily reorganize the file, perhaps with perl or such.

Answer 1

This is how you could do it in python:

#!/usr/bin/python2.5
from email.utils import parsedate
import mailbox

def extract_date(email):
    date = email.get('Date')
    return parsedate(date)

the_mailbox = mailbox.mbox('/path/to/mbox')
sorted_mails = sorted(the_mailbox, key=extract_date)
the_mailbox.update(enumerate(sorted_mails))
the_mailbox.flush()

Answer 2

Python solution wont work if mail messages was imported into mbox using Thunderbird's ImportExportTools addon. There are a bug: messages shall prefix with 'from' line in format:

From - Tue Apr 27 19:42:22 2010

but ImportExportTools prefix with such 'from' line:

From - Sat May 01 2010 15:07:31 GMT+0400 (Russian Daylight Time)

So there are two errors:

1. sequence 'time year' broken into 'year time'
2. extra trash with GMT info along with time zone name

Since Python's mailbox.py/UnixMailbox has hardcoded regexp for 'from' line matching, some of messages can't parsed.

I wrote the error message to the author, but there are many mistakenly imported messages :(.

Answer 3

What's the point in rewriting the mbox whereas you can reorder the mails in memory when loading up the mailbox? Which time is the one you want to order on? Receive date? Sent date? Anyway, all the Ruby/Python/Perl modules for playing with mboxes can do that.