#4 Extract each email messages to individual file

[Anonymous]

Basically what I am after is a tool that will iterate
through a PST file and save all the email messages into
separate files as rfc822 / mime format preserving all the
body parts headers and attachments. We need to
export the messages to be able to import them into a
document management system.

[Tim Heaney]

Logged In: YES
user_id=827666

Forgive me for speaking out of turn, I just stumbled in here
looking for something to convert a .dbx file to mbox format,
but...

It seems to me you don't really need this. Once you have
files in mbox format, you can use any number of methods to
split them into individual messages. You can use formail
(part of procmail), along with a little shell script

#!/bin/sh

#
# createfile - Use this with formail to split a Unix mbox into
# individual files named message.1, message.2, ...
#
# FILENO=1 formail -ds createfile < mboxfile
#
# Basically, formail is looking for the name of a program,
so this is
# a program which simply redirects its input to a file.
#

cat > message.$FILENO

or Perl's Email::Folder module

perl -MEmail::Folder -e
'$f=Email::Folder->new(shift);while($m=$f->next_message){$n++;open
F,"> message.$n" or die; print F $m->as_string}' mboxfile

or Python's email and mailbox modules

#!/usr/bin/python

import email
import mailbox

num = 1
for msg in mailbox.PortableUnixMailbox(open('mboxfile'),
email.message_from_file):
file = open('message.' + str(num), 'w')
print >>file, msg
num += 1

or something similar in whatever your favorite scripting
language is. Once you've got the data out of its proprietary
format, the battle's already won.

[Nobody/Anonymous]

Logged In: NO

Se the manpage for csplit

Roughly:

csplit mboxfilename "/^From /" {*}