Comments on: Mark Pilgrim and Mail.app’s “Save As…” function

By: a crank’s progress » email from across the centuries

a crank’s progress » email from across the centuries — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 17:09:17 +0000

[...] Unlike other notable whiners, Maciej understands that while mbox is not a standard, IMAP is. Shame about the emoticons, though. [...]

By: Sunny

Sunny — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 00:17:31 +0000

I thought there was no valid mbox format. The only real test is whether it would open in a text editor (and hopefully in your mail client)!

By: Jeff Flowers

Jeff Flowers — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 18:38:58 +0000

When I read that the was no standard for the mbox format, I have to admit that I was really surprised. I would have thought it would have appeared in an RFC or the Posix standards, but obviously I am wrong.

I kind of wish that Apple had made use of Maildir when revising Mail.app for Tiger, rather than reinventing the wheel, but they probably has good reason for not doing so.

By: paul

paul — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 16:36:21 +0000

Â there is no â€œstandardâ€ mbox format.

So that renders his argument moot: he claimed that Mail.app in Tiger migrated away from mbox, breaking compatibility and denying his access to 14 years of email. If mbox is not a standard — more a custom than a codified format — then why was he relying on it in the first place?Â

By: ramanan

ramanan — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 15:37:42 +0000

Patrick is right; there is no “standard” mbox format.

By: Patrick Taylor

Patrick Taylor — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 15:28:53 +0000

Problem is that mbox isn’t a standard … it’s a family of mutually incompatible file formats that (AFAIK) never been formally defined through an RFC.

The closest to a standard for mbox (in the Unix world) is mboxrd and even Thunderbird extends and modifies it.

mbox is open but loosely (and ill-) defined, that might fit Mark’s definition of an open standard, but not mine.

By: Graeme

Graeme — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 14:46:19 +0000

“couldnâ€™t handel the switch to x86 processors?”

mm but he bought a new x86 to run ubuntu on… that makes even less sense than the whole data fidelity thing

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 12:51:08 +0000

Jeff suggested:

I personally suspect that Mark switched for many reasons, and â€œdata fidelityâ€ was just a small part of it. Maybe, deep down, he couldnâ€™t handel the switch to x86 processors?

I think that’s true. As others have pointed out, the problems he has with Mail.app – for example – are hardly insurmountable. Something else is going on.

By: Jeff Flowers

Jeff Flowers — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 11:40:55 +0000

I think that the important thing is keeping stuff in open formats.

I keep all my word processing in plain text files with Unix line feeds. My digital camera pictures are kept in jpeg. My screenshot archives are in jpeg and png. My music files are encoded in Flac and MP3. All of these open just fine in Mac OS X, XP, or Linux.

Even my comic book collection database, which is kept in a sqlite database and managed from the command line, is cross platform since Sqlite is in the public domain and works on every OS that I might use.

I personally suspect that Mark switched for many reasons, and “data fidelity” was just a small part of it. Maybe, deep down, he couldn’t handel the switch to x86 processors?

By: paul

paul — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 04:49:33 +0000

Just to be sure I wasn’t as big a whiner as Pilgrim, IÂ

* Â saved a mailbox’s contents (select all-> save as -> Raw Message Format),
* Â downloaded Thunderbird
* Â Â dropped the file I created (it looked like an mbox to me but I figured I’d see if the importer saw it that way) in Thunderbird’s Local Folders directory
* Â Â and hey presto.Â It was all there.Â

I’m more convinced than ever that this whole ‘OS X sux! Linux roXXors!1!’ is just a way to gin up some traffic and rile up the fanboys.Â

Move on, nothing more to see here.Â