PINE - E-mail Archiving

This document describes the procedure to convert e-mails in the Pine system to the portable document format (.pdf) and then full-text index the .pdf e-mails for archiving.

Exporting Pine e-mails to a Text File

1. Login to a Unix machine and run Pine.
2. In the initial screen, go to the Pine SETUP (type S) to configure Pine Options.
3. Select Config as the setup task (type C).
4. Go to [ Advanced Command Preferences ] and set the “enable-aggregate-command-set” option.
5. Exit SETUP and commit changes made.
6. Go to the folder containing mails to be exported (may be inbox or an offline folder).
7. The command to select multiple e-mails in the folder is “;” (semicolon). Once “;” is pressed, Pine will ask for a Select Criteria. (You can select all the mails in the folder by pressing “A”, or can select e-mails by specific number by pressing “N”, or by status by pressing “S” or by Date by pressing “D”.
8. Once you have selected the e-mails to be exported, just press the Apply command “A”.
9. Pine will ask for a command to be applied to the selected e-mails. Enter “E” as the command (export command) and then give the filename in your home directory that should contain the exported e-mails.

After Exporting the mails to a file proceed to the next step

Converting Pine e-mails in a text file to ‘pdf’

1. Login to a windows machine to perform conversion. Before beginning the procedure make sure you have the ‘parse’ and ‘text2pdf’ programs (refer appendix) properly compiled using Visual studio 6.0. Have the programs and the text file under one directory.
2. Run the application ‘parse’ with the text file containing pine emails as command line argument. ‘Parse’ is an MFC console application developed with Microsoft visual studio 6.0. Look into Appendix 1 for the source code.
3. The ‘parse’ program uses another program ‘text2pdf’ (a C program) for converting each e-mail into a pdf file. Look into Appendix 2 for the source code
4. The ‘parse’ program parses the input text file, separates each e-mail and converts it into a pdf file. The pdf file is named with the ‘Date-From- Subject” combination of the e-mail parsed.
5. After ‘parse’ is run, a list of pdf files will be produced in the same directory, each file containing an e-mail and named with the ‘Date-From-Subject’ convention.
6. The pdf files then can be full text indexed using the Adobe Acrobat software.

Appendix 1

The source code for “Parse” can be found in this file :

Parse.cpp

Appendix 2

The source code for “text2pdf”” can be found in this file :

Text2pdf.c