Please help me export data from Agent to NMP...

Gene

I am a long time user of Agent, but am looking for something with greater functionality. NMP looks like it will do everything I am looking for (and more Very Happy

).

I have many (text only) posts, saved in Agent, that I would like to import into NMP. Is that possible, and if so, how? I would certainly hate to lose that data.

administrator · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 3:09 pm Post subject:

I haven't used Agent in so long, I've forgotten whether it can export articles in mbox format. If it can, I would recommend doing that. Now, NMP won't be able to read the mbox file, yet, but it will. In the meantime, you could either refer to the articles as needed using Agent, or use whatever you want to read/search the mbox file directly.

If you choose to use MySQL/SQL Server, you could also import the data yourself using queries, but it would take a bit of work.

Regards

Gene · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 7:59 pm Post subject:

Wow! 18 minutes for a response Exclamation

That's service.

It looks like there is a "save as" function that allows one to create the Mbox files. There may be a problem, though. From Google groups I find:

"Unfortunately this function isn't strictly following the definition for
the mbox format, as Agent doesn't escape lines beginning with the word
From correctly. Many newsreaders, and Hamster too, are fooled by this
quirk in Agent's export format and will either split the message here
(and create malformed dummy messages from the following lines) or drop
the rest when importing the file. Even a single line

From

can trigger this behaviour."

I shudder at the thought of hand editing 250,000 messages to fix this. Could this be something to be considered when NMP is given the capability to import Mbox files?

administrator · Posted: Tue Jan 08, 2008 8:09 pm Post subject:

If you read the mbox spec, you'll find that without proper quoting of non-starting From_ lines, there really is no way to tell that the message is mangled. That's why most email clients and newsreaders exporting to mbox properly quote From_ lines that need it.

I would suggest then that you either:

1) Keep Agent around to refer to these old messages.

or

2) Export then to mbox and use a text editor to search the mbox file when you need to look up something from an old message.

If any of these of these older messages are still available on your news server, you should probably download them again in NMP. I'm sure you'll need to refer to the older ones less and less over time.

Regards