Question

Hi,

This is Grainne from the EAS project at Harvard. I am looking at how we might use ePADD here for donor appraisal and use it's output for processing in EAS. One of the email formats that EAS handles is mbox files, so if we could obtain the result of ePADD appraisal in mbox format it could possibly then be used as input into EAS.

Is it possible to export the output from the appraisal module to an mbox format - and if so will the mbox be lossless?

If not, I can see that you can export from the delivery module into an mbox format. If I were to load the palin.mbox into the ePADD appraisal module, archive it unchanged, load that archive into the processing module, export that unchanged and load that archive into the delivery module and then export to mbox, would the original mbox be identical to the final mbox? If not, do you know how it would differ?

Thanks for any information,
Grainne Reilly
Senior Software Engineer
Library Technology Services
Harvard University

Answer 1

Hi Grainne,

Thank for your question. I worked with the Royal Library of Copenhagen this summer and realized that they also had a need to get mbox file from ePADD appraisal module. We developed an experimental version for this purpose. We plan to include this feature in our 2016 Apr release. We have not performed extensive testings on this version. If you need it sooner, please email me directly. We are not sure about the "lossless" migration to mbox because we don't have tools to verify that. If you know of such tool, please let us know.

Comments

Thanks, that is great news. I don't know of a tool to verify "lossness" of an mbox, but if I come across one I will be sure to post about it here.

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Hi Peter, I have been thinking about export of mboxs out of ePADD. It's something that would be useful in our institutional context as well. What would also be useful if possible was if the export process could also provide the user with a log file that tracked any actions done within ePADD such as which emails were restricted or were not transferred.
Thanks,
Jessica

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Hi Jessica,

We have just finished our first partner face-to-face meeting yesterday and had scheduled to work on preservation issues starting from the third year of the project. So, we will add a simple mbox export function in our first release in Jun 2016 and will incorporate more preservation related log in our 5th release.

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Thanks Peter, sounds good!