Preserving Original Date when Importing EML Archive

Revision as of 10:19, 14 July 2010 by Fmarques (talk | contribs)

By default, when ZCS imports a EML archive file using the UI, it will take the date modified in the .eml file properties instead of the original Date on the message header. This issue has already been raised with bug 39838:

http://bugzilla.zimbra.com/show_bug.cgi?id=39838

This is the expected behavior. Starting with ZCS 6.0.0, there is a new option to import a EML archive and preserve the original timestamp from each message. More information can be found by reading the REST API concept guide located at /opt/zimbra/docs/rest.txt (Upload options).

   timestamp=0 do not use the archive entry date as the received
   date for msgs or the creation date for documents. Msg dates
   will be inferred from the Date header if available

Since this feature has not been implemented on the UI, we have to manually call the REST API from the command line.

Using zmmailbox with postRestURL:

  • Copy your .zip EML archive file containing the eml archives to the zcs server (make sure you choose a temporary directory with plenty of enough space).
  • Import your .zip EML archive file using the following command:
   zmmailbox -z -m user@domain.com postRestURL "inbox?fmt=zip&timestamp=0&subfolder=/EML" /tmp/Eml-archive.zip

It will import the /tmp/Eml-archive.zip file into user@domain.com EML subfolder, preserving the original timestamps.

Using zmmailbox with addMessage:

This method might be useful if there is a memory constraint when uploading/extracting a big zip file prior to processing each .eml file.

  • Unzip Eml-archive.zip on a temporary directory of the ZCS server.
  • With this method, there is no automatic creation of the folder, so you might want to create it first on ZCS (using EML as an example).
  • Go to the same directory where you extracted the Eml-archive.zip and run the following command:
   for i in *.eml ; do zmmailbox -z -m user@domain.com addMessage /inbox/EML $i ; done

It will import all the .eml files into user@domain.com EML subfolder, preserving the original timestamps. This could take more time, depending on the number of messages and respective size.

More information can be found at the Zmmailbox and ZCS_6.0:Zimbra_REST_API_Reference guide.


--Fmarques 13:27, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

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