I'm using the most recent build of Mozilla Thunderbird email client (and very good it is too).

I have now built up a very comprehensive library of spam messages that I would like to use as a pump primer for my bayesian plugin for spampal.

I need to export the entire contents of my spam mail folder as individual text files.

anyone have any clues how to do this without needing to individually save each message as text (1000+messages)?

Cheers!

Only a semi-flippant answer....

Perhaps you need to write a plug in to do that first? :)

What format do the messages get saved in on disk? It might be possible to write something to parse the message folders.

Joe

well, I checked the THunderbird site for extensions that might manage it, but to no avail.

I'd write one if I knew how.

I had a look at the advice for writing extensions, and immediately had to lie down.

the messages are saved as a proprietary databse file I think.


If I find a solution I'll post it....

This is a bit of a hack way around it but it might work :D ....

If you select all of the messages that you want to export to individual files and then right click and click 'forward as attachments" then save it as a draft (or send it to yourself but that will take time and bandwidth). Then find the email in your local drafts folder, it will consist purely of all of the spam emails as seperate text files which you can then save locally.

Hmmmm.... that seems a bit complex but it does work :D

Hope that helps,

Grant

Program called MBox2eml.

http://people.freenet.de/ukrebs/mbox2eml.html

Its written in Java so you need the Java Runtime Environment, link at the bottom of the page.

Run the .jar file, file, load MBox, navigate to your mail folder, find the appropriate MBox (my junk file was at Default User\Mail\Local Folders\Junk), file, export all messages, choose a folder.

Emails are outputted in .eml format, which is plain text with all the headers.

http://www.supportware.net/mozilla/#ext13

Thunderbird AutoSave extension: "The extension also supports saving an entire TB folder to disk as individual files".

Probably easier.