ATTENTION! The URL for this thing is invalid cos I'm too poor to pay for hosting! Some semblance of a web site should be back up before long however - watch this space.

Do you have literally grillions of your buddies' messages in your message inbox? Do you? No, no you don't, because nobody likes you. However, if your inbox is getting full of those /msgs you keep sending yourself from alias accounts in order to feel loved, you may begin to bemoan the ongoing lack of a "select all" button on e2's own archiving page. You may also begin to bemoan the amount of time it takes for the message inbox to load in all of your messages, prompting a thought bubble to drift above your head, filled with wistful daydreams about wonderful web pages which will allow you to input your username and password, then give you the contents of your entire message inbox in the form of a text file.

Dream no more, comrades! For I have crafted just such a web page via the gift of the PHP. Upon entering therein, you will be confronted by several things; namely a form into which you may type your username and password, and an exciting-looking button marked "login". What mystery awaits? Let me explain.

Once you log in for the first time you'll be able to click the "archive e2 inbox" link, which will bring up yet more options for your perusing pleasure. You'll be able to either overwrite any previous archive files on the server with your current messages, or append them onto the end. You can choose to either copy your e2 inbox or move it (ie empty it once it's been archived). Finally, you can split your archive up into several files by specifiying the maximum amount of messages to go into each file (there's a minimum of 100). Just leave this blank if you want one big file. Huzzah!

Now, this complicates the whole "append" option. Let me explain, and bear with me... If you split your archive into several files last time you logged in, and click "append" this time, then your previous files will be kept intact and the new one(s) created alongside them. However, if you didn't split them up the last time and only have one big archive file, and choose to do the same this time, clicking "append" will add your messages onto the end of the one file.

Once you click "get messages" and after your messages are downloaded and archived, you'll be given the option to download the archived messages, and to delete them from the server if you so desire.

Beware, however, that I haven't tested it too rigorously so any bugs or suggestions would be welcome (storing the messages in a database and re-parsing them into text files every time they are reqested for download might be an idea, I may get around to doing that some day). Cheers!

http://www.coldknife.net/e2/inbox/

PS, there is a bug in IE 5.5 which may break the download, due to the way the script feeds the file to the browser. I'm not entirely sure what causes this (it's actually documented on the PHP web site), but it seems to affect the larger files, so if your messages number in the thousands try splitting them into several files. /msg me with any more problems. Cheers!


For v2 thanks go to ascorbic for informing me that the userpass cookie can be sent via the query string, thus saving me all the fsockopen() / HTTP hassle. I should have known how CGI.pm works being as I started learning Perl for CGI before PHP. I'm stupid.

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