Tag Archives: convert

Linux, Mail

Dovecot: convert mdbox to mbox format

Leave a comment

Dovecot comes with a proprietary mailbox-format (sd/mdbox) that provides some benefits in regard of compression and performance but is not really readable with nothing else than an editor.

It seems that there are very little information on how to convert the sd/mdbox-fomat to mbox (at least nothing copy and paste like if you aren’t a dovecot admin and have no clue ;))

So here is one possible-way it could be archived:

To work around adapting the dovecot-config and running a dovecot-service for dsync to use, we can also pass configuration parameters (by default dsync uses the dovecot-configuration file stored at /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf) directly to dsync.
With that trick there is no need to configure & start a dovecot service.

An example command to convert a mailbox in mdbox-format located in the users home dir under mail to mbox format would look like:

dsync -o "mail_location=mdbox:~/mail" backup mbox:~/dstest

Converting to other formats like maildir might require additional configuration parameters within the /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf file as namespaces or similar.

IMPORTANT:
Override options specified via “-o” must be passed directly after the dsync command and before “backup”


For converting a mailbox the “backup” attribute is recommended as this will do a 1-way-sync.

Database, Linux

ORACLE – Convert datetime to epoch / unixtimestamp

2 Comments

It seems Oracle DB doesn’t provide a function to create a unix timestamp from an internal datetime. I have to admit – I’m kinda disappointed about that, but OK – its Oracle …

So, how can we get a timestamp from Oracle. I have googled quite a time, but non of the solutions google offered me worked, so i it’s time to think about it by myself and ended up with the following solution:

[pastacode lang=”sql” manual=”select%20(extract(day%20from%20(EVENT_TIME%20%20-%20to_date(’01-JAN-1970’%2C’DD-MON-YYYY’)))*86400%2Bextract(hour%20from%20EVENT_TIME)*3600%2Bextract(minute%20from%20EVENT_TIME)*60%2Bextract(second%20from%20EVENT_TIME))%20as%20EPOCH%20from%20SOMETABLE%20order%20by%20event_time%20DESC%3B%0A” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]

At first I subtract the start of the epoch from my current timestamp. this will provide me the days since 1970-01-01. Afterwards I extract hours, minutes and seconds from the timestamp and with all those data it’s possible to calc the timestamp of the specific datetime.