against databases

[Mo McRoberts]

On 17-Jan-2010, at 02:12, Gus Mueller wrote:

> That was my original thought as well, but then I tried to find some official documentation on .emlx files, and there was none.  I guess there's this:
> http://www.jwz.org/hacks/emlx.pl

That’s a fair point, though the basic format is simpler than that Perl script makes it seem (RFC2822 message length in bytes as decimal ASCII numerals, newline, message itself, XML plist).

Given that the aim isn’t to interoperate with Mail.app, the fact that the format is undocumented almost doesn’t matter: I would suspect the reason it’s not documented is because Apple might decide to change it in the future, but I can’t envisage a scenario where they’d do that but also not maintain backwards-compatibility in the things which *read* .emlx files (e.g., Spotlight, Quick Look) — even if a new Mail.app itself performs a one-time conversion on its own message files when it’s first launched. That’s not to say it couldn’t happen, but it seems relatively unlikely.

M.