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This software is courtesy hosted by SourceForge.net

What is Xineo XMA ?

For various reasons, it is often needed to archive e-mails, i.e. export them from a mail client or server in order to store them in a mass storage device. However, most (if not all) mail management software currently use storage formats that are not suitable for direct archiving. Indeed, common formats (Mbox, MailDir and MH) store mails MIME-encoded, which means :

• messages are almost not human-readable (depends on the encoding, but anything beyond plain ASCII has to be encoded) ;
• all parts of a message are stored in a single file, mixing text and all attachments ;
• file organization is often difficult to handle (MBOX stores all mails in a single file, and other formats use cryptic file organisation) ;
• messages are not searcheable with common plain-text search tools like ht://Dig ;
• messages are not easily exploitable by third-party programs ;
• most messaging client mix these file formats with their own file formats and organisation in order to handle indexation and various meta-data ;
• there is no guarantee that these formats will be easily readable in the future.

Xineo XMA (XML Mail Archiver) aims to provide a simple way to archive mails in XML under a well-specified schema, in order to make this data durably and easily accessible to users and third-party software :

• each message is stored in a separate file, and only includes the header and plain-text parts ;
• each attachment is stored in a separate file in its native format ;
• simple index files are also provided for each set of exported mails.

In order to handle as many input formats as possible, XMA relies on the JavaMail API, which means that it is able to archive mails from POP3 and IMAP servers, MBOX, MailDir and MH file formats using third-party providers (MBOX included with XMA distribution), as well as any JavaMail supported mail providers.

XML schemas are specified using XSchema. The distribution also includes sample XSLT and CSS stylesheets that can be used to visualize the exported messages.

Current release is preliminary, and mostly intended to get some feedback. So everything is subject to changes. Please don't hesitate to send comments, especially about XML schemas.

Sample output

A set of sample messages exported in XML (mostly spam) is available here. If you use a reasonably recent browser (like Mozilla or IE6), you whould see XSLT-styled pages. In this case, use the "View Page Source" command of your browser to see the raw XML files.Go to sample output...

Documentation

Usage : java -jar xineo-xma.jar <options>, where available options are :

• -s URL : mail-store URL as understood by JavaMail (required). For instance : mbox:///home/bob/mail/mbox.
• -o Path : output directory (default : working directory).
• -e Encoding : output encoding (default : system encoding). For instances : UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, etc.
• -i StyleSheet : XSLT stylesheet that should be used to render index files (default : none).
• -m StyleSheet : XSLT stylesheet that should be used to message index files (default : none).

Uncommented API documentation is available here. More documentation will be available in the future.

Schemas

The following namespaces are currently defined :

• http://www.xineo.net/schema/mail/message-1.0 for message files ;
• http://www.xineo.net/schema/mail/index-1.0 for index files.

The corresponding schemas are specified :

• http://www.xineo.net/schema/mail/message-1.0.xsd ;
• http://www.xineo.net/schema/mail/index-1.0.xsd.

Download

Downloads are available at SourceForge's download center. Look for the xineo-mail package.

Licence

Xineo XMA is free software. It is published under the GNU GPL.