OutlookToBlogFilter: How can I move a folders worth of emails onto a MT blog?

February 18, 2006 10:09 AM

OutlookToBlogFilter: How can I move a folders worth of emails onto a MT blog?

I'm one of the founders of a Yahoo Group dedicated to sending out quotes, and have an archive of all the posts dating back to its inception in 2000. I'd like to put this online where it can be browsable by submitter (i.e. the person in the "From" line). The most straightforward way, it would seem, would be to find some way to export this folder to a format that can be imported by the MT application?

My Google-fu has failed me, and I'm hoping not to have to cut and paste each of the 3000 posts.

posted by softlord to computers & internet (8 comments total)

I would find a way to export the emails into a text file and then work with find/replace and/or grep to manipulate that into a format that could be imported into MT.

I am pretty sure there are fancier ways of doing this, however.
posted by mikel at 10:20 AM on February 18, 2006

Saving emails as text files is easy in Outlook (select the email(s), then File - Save As).

You could create Search Folders or Views to limit the visible emails to those from a certain poster. Then save those as text files, resulting in one text file for each.

I'm not familiar with MT, so I can't offer a knowledgeable suggestion there. But opening the email text files in Word would give you the option to convert to HTML, which may get you another step closer?
posted by SuperSquirrel at 11:12 AM on February 18, 2006

To be clearer - "resulting in one text file for each POSTER", not for each separate email.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 11:14 AM on February 18, 2006

Upon further review: You have the option to save emails as HTML directly right from Outlook.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 11:16 AM on February 18, 2006

Why do you think that's the easiest way? A blog is not the universal solution for everything. Why not just use mailing list archiving software like MHonArc or Macho? A very large number of projects have their entire mailing list history archived on the web using these programs.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:51 AM on February 18, 2006

And by the way the standard format for email archives is mbox format. You can export Outlook folders to mbox format using a tool or you can just run a script to grab the whole archive of messages from Yahoo directly in mbox format.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:55 AM on February 18, 2006

...you can also just install Thunderbird, which uses mbox format natively, and when prompted import the messages from Outlook.
posted by Rhomboid at 11:57 AM on February 18, 2006

Newsgator has a plugin which posts to MT from Outlook, but your best choice is OutlookMT, which does exactly what you want.
posted by anildash at 6:04 PM on February 18, 2006