SYNOPSIS

 use Mail::Box::Dbx;
 my $folder = Mail::Box::Dbx->new(...);

See SYNOPSIS in Mail::Box

DESCRIPTION

This documentation describes how to read from Outlook Express (dbx) folders. Even on Unix/Linux, you can access these folders to read the data, or copy it to a different format. Modifying of xbd files is not supported.

These dbx folders are accessed using Mail::Transport::Dbx which is distributed via CPAN as separate package. This MAil::Transport::Dbx module is based on the open source library named libpst, which can be found at http://alioth.debian.org/projects/libpst/. The library does not support writing of dbx files, and therefore limits the possibilities of this package.

See DESCRIPTION in Mail::Box::File

DETAILS

How DBX folders work

DBX files are create by Outlook Express. I can not tell you too much about it, because me (as author) never use Windows or MicroSoft tools. Still, it is possible to access some Outlook created folders from Unix.

The folder structure for dbx starts with a single Folders.dbx file. This folder contains names of sub-folders. Each folder can either contain messages, or contains sub-folders. Combinations are not possible.

This implementation

The ol2mbox project (see http://sourceforge.net/project/ol2mbox/) has created a libdbx which can read dbx files using nearly any operating system. You can simply transport a dbx file from Windows to Unix/Linux and the read all the messages from it.

Tassilo von Parseval wrote a Perl wrapper around this C-library, and distributes it as Mail::Transport::Dbx. Although it named in one the MailBox namespaces, it is a separate product, because it requires a C compiler. Besides, the module will have its own life.

Converting DBX folders to MBOX

The title of this section is to attract your attension, but is does not describe anything special related to DBX or MBOX: you can convert any kind of mail folder into an other with the following code.

» Example: converting folders
 my $from = Mail::Box::Dbx->new(folder => 'Folder.dbx')
    or exit;

 my $to   = Mail::Box::Mbox->new(folder => '/tmp/mbox',
    access => 'w', create => 1) or die;

 $from->copyTo($to);