Libelle Mail Archive Manual

Loading manually archived mail

Its possible to load previously archived mail into the Libelle Mail Archive database. This is achieved by formatting the mail into files in mbox format and running MALoader, configured to use the mstor provider, to read the files and load them into the database. The following activities must be run as the Libelle Mail Archive user in a directory that contains the Libelle Mail Archive configuration files.

Once the mail is in mbox format files the steps are:

  1. Run the loader from the command line. Parameters that differ from the settings defined in maloader.conf should be overridden by specifying them as command line options. These will typically be the mailbox name and provider used to read it together with the -sv options. -s causes MALoader to run in scan mode and -v increases the reporting level.

    Run the command:

    runLoader -t=mstor -m=path/to/mbox -sv

    This applies all the usual checks, generating a report on stdout but not loading any messages into the archive.

  2. Some addresses may be rejected because their domains are no longer active. You can force these to be accepted by adding 'accept' parameters to mailarchive.conf.
  3. If there are major formatting problems, the affected messages should be fixed or discarded. MAFixMessages may help to repair some message header problems. Individually failing messages that are repairable will be written to separate mbox format mailboxes in the 'rejects' directory where they can be easily found and inspected.
  4. Repeat the previous steps until you are happy that all the messages you want to keep can be loaded.

  5. Now empty the rejects directory and load the files into the database by running:

    runLoader -t=mstor -m=path/to/mbox -v

  6. Messages written to the rejects directory can be inspected, repaired and loaded one at a time by running:

    runLoader -t=mstor -m=rejectsdir/messagename -v

Use MASearch and MAUpdate to inspect the database contents, remove any unwanted messages and set the 'do not archive' and 'self' flags on addresses as appropriate. See step 6: Libelle Mail Archive programs for more detail.