Reading email from a mail file

Question

I have a huge number of mail archives that I want to de-duplicate and sort out. The archives are either in mbox format or contain a single mail message. To add a bit of complication, some of the files have windows EOL sequences, and some have the unix EOL.
Using C#. how do I read an archive and split it into its individual messages, or read a single message file? In python, I would use the mailbox.mbox class, but I cannot see the matching functionality in the C# documentation.

Answer 1

It is unlikely that you will find a library to read that file for C# - there aren't that many Unix users who also use C#.

What I would do would be either to:

1. Read the Python code, and then port it to C#
2. Find the description of the mbox format online. As it is a Unix system, chances are that the format is just a plain text file, which should be easy enough to parse.

Answer 2

Most standard Unix mail files delimit entries with a line starting "From "

So if you read in the mail file as a text file and switch to a new mail entry every time you see the string "From " at the start of a line it should work - Any strings elsewhere should already have been delimited by the email program

Answer 3

If it one-time activity I think easiest steps to sort messages:

1. join all the mbox files into one
2. load compilation into thunderbird as local folder
3. run one of Duplicate message finder Add-On on folder
4. delete found dupliates
5. compact folder
6. take the dup-free message list :)

Duplicate Elimiators (Add-Ons for Thunderbird)

I've used this: Remove Duplicate Messages (Alternate)