NoPriv.py - Easy IMAP email backup to HTML archive | Hacker News Reader

NoPriv.py - Easy IMAP email backup to HTML archive

raymii.org

35 pointsmdewinter5 comments

is this a good idea? shouldn't backups be in a standard format (for the medium in question)? what if i want to import emails from this backup into another mail program / mail provider?

it seems like a useful static(?) interface to email, but as a backup it's oddly restrictive.

maybe it's just confusion over the use of the word "backup". but for me, a tarball of maildirs, while not readable by a human, is closer to what i expect that to mean. perhaps this could be modified to provide both?

Not only does it generate a non-standard format, the HTML has significant problems:

- It would be relatively hard to reconstruct the email with a script, e.g. the headers are formatted as a plain text with <strong> for the labels, the data left unmarked in anyway and <br> for line breaks (no ids or classes at all). From http://sparklingnetwork.nl/nopriv/2012/12/26.html:

    <strong>From:</strong> "Remy van Elst &lt;relstnl@gmail.com&gt;"
    <br />
    <strong>To: </strong>""backup@sparklingnetwork.nl" &lt;backup@sparklingnetwork.nl&gt;"
    <br />

- It's invalid markup[1], with the email's HTML contents inserted wholesale, including the <head> and <body> tags.

- Not sure if this is a problem with NoPriv.py, or if it has occured earlier in the chain, but something has screwed up character encodings, e.g. in the URLs here: http://sparklingnetwork.nl/nopriv/2012/12/1.html (The page is served with no encoding specified nor is there a <meta http-equiv> so it defaults to UTF-8, and these characters are invalid. However, even in Latin-1 or anything else, they are definitely not '=' which appears to be what they should be.)

(The markup is also horrible, with strange indentations and a lot of extraneous whitespace and one-cell tables.)

[1]: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsparklingnetw...

Simple enough issues to fix, of course, since this project is open source and only 431 lines of Python.

https://github.com/RaymiiOrg/NoPriv/blob/master/nopriv.py

It's appealing to me. I've got some Maildir (I think) archives sitting around, I've been contemplating feeding them into my GMail, but this seems like a neat and straight-forward way to do it. It's not like I need to interact with the e-mail anymore, it's at least three years out of date, but I've needed something from it a few times and it's fun to take trips down memory lane.

If you have maildirs, just use offlineimap or isync to ingest the mail into GMail.

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