So I came up with a great idea the other day. It’s rare that I come up with great ideas but I did. I have around 200mb of chatlogs, dating back to 2004. That’s 5 years worth of chatlogs. Half of it is purely txt whilst the other half is HTML.

So I was going through my gmail the other day and decided to go through my chats and a thought came to me. Google stores chatlogs as emails. Wouldn’t it be great if gmail can store all my other chatlogs as emails?

So I got to work. First thing I did was to see if it was already done already. Somebody it seems has already done it, except the script was written in VB, and it didn’t work…causing some kind of runtime error. I looked up ways to generate my own .msg files, import them into Outlook and then syncing outlook with gmail. msg files it seems is a messy piece of crap, mixing what appears to be binary with txt. So, I looked elsewhere. I discovered that Thunderbird stored emails in plain txt. Excellent. I just had to extract the formatting for the mail headers and write a script that parses all my chatlogs and outputs each individual converstion into neat little emails.

After an hour or so tinkering with a python script I was able to generate a thunderbird compatible email folder. But then came the problem of uploading it all. Gmail apparently restricts the amount of emails you can upload at any given time. 10 emails at a time is fine…50…it just dies. So now I have to find ANOTHER solution. Well, I found that google has developed a rather obscure app called “Google email uploader” it allows you to upload your emails from Outlook/Thunderbird to a Google App hosted email address.

Luckily, I have one so I can upload it to my domain email address. I’ll then have to sync it to my normal gmail account. Yes, it’s quite an endeavour just to store some chatlogs but hey, it’s fun!

I’ll also have to find a way to embed images into the emails, something that I have no idea where to start.

But yeah, I’ve been going over some extremely old chatlogs and it’s made me miss some of the things that I used to talk about.

Well, for those who are interested, I’ll post up a copy of the script later. There’s gonna be two versions, one for Messenger Plus! logs and the other for pidgin.