Saving Electronic Mail to Macintosh Disks/Files

This is a set of instructions on how to take the huge files of mail that accumulate on weber accounts and dump them to Macintosh disks for storage.

The process involves cleaning out old, unwanted mail, further removal of unnecessary headers from the desired mail file, moving that file (using ftp) to the Mac, and turning the file from an ascii file to a MS Word file so it can be manipulated on the Mac and then removing the oldmail file from your weber account.

NOTE: Command lines are in italics

Cleaning up Oldmail

The first step is to rid yourself of old, unwanted mail. Assuming your mail is in your mbox file, type:

% mail -f mbox

(of course, if your mail is in another file, substitute that filename for "mbox" in the above command).

Go through your mail, and delete all unwanted mail.

Next, rename the mbox file to something useful. My preference is the filename "bjmail.date" - where "date" is a string of six numbers that begin with the year (so that the files list in chronological order when listed on weber or in a Mac window).

% mv mbox bjmail.960124

Then comes cleaning out unneeded header information (which can reduce the size of the file by as much as 25%.):

% clean bjmail.960124

Now you have a file that you can transfer to your Mac.

Transfering a file from Weber to a Mac

1. Grab your mouse and drag down the File menu to FTP Enable.

2. Hold the cloverleaf key down and hit the "f" key. This initiates an ftp (File Transfer Protocol) session

3. At the "ftp>" prompt, type: put filename

(where "filename" is the name of the file you wish to transfer)

4. When the "ftp>" prompt reappears, "quit" ftp but do not logout of weber.

Put the weber login session in the background by using the icon at the top, right corner of the screen and "Hide Telnet 2.5"

Open the transferred file with Word

Find the icon for the file and drag it until it is over the Word icon. When the Word icon changes color (darkens), release the mouse button and the document will be opened with Word. If this doesn't work, open Word as though you were about to create a new document and then, with the File menu or the cloverleaf-o combination, open your transferred document.

When you make one change to the file, and then close the file, it will become a MS Word file, with a Word-style icon. I usually insert and then remove a space at the beginning of the text (where the cursor shows up first).

Your mail file is now safely on your Mac. All that remains is to return to your weber login session (back to the icon at the top right corner of the screen and select "Telnet 2.5" from the bottom half of the menu) and remove the old file from your weber account:

% rm bjmail.960124

Which now frees up the disk space and reduces your quota consumption.

(c)Copyright 1985, 1996 by Bruce Jones

1. Sections used are reproduced entirely and without alteration
2. The following page footer is reproduced on each page:
   BJ's UNIX Primer - (c) Bruce Jones - 1985, 1996
3. Full credit is noted somewhere in the reproduction

Bruce Jones 			Department of Communication
bjones@ucsd.edu			University of California, San Diego
(619) 534-0417/4410		9500 Gilman Drive
FAX (619) 534-7315		La Jolla, Ca. 92093-0503

This page last updated on: Feb 3 1997