I know this is a seriously old post but I’ve been reading newest to oldest for a couple of weeks now (at least the geeky type stuff). I once upon a time hosted a website and email for a company my wife worked for. I didn’t charge, only doing it to benefit her. Her partner decided to switch hosts overnight in some sort of delusional state maybe thinking it would hurt her or hurt my feelings or some other weird shit. Only after he repointed DNS did he think that he still needed access to his email. I copied the mail spool onto CD and dropped it by his office. I think he was expecting me to spend all kinds of time making it pretty when they weren’t paying me to begin with.

Wonder why your email admin did it the way he did?

Yeah i would think that the mail server admin has to have unix skills, He probably just don’t care. lol.

Well, the mail server admin has to have unix skills. It kinda comes with the territory – I’m assuming he was just being lazy. Either that, or it just didn’t occur to him that it would be possible to make my life easier with just 1 line of awk. ;)

In the Beginning was the Command Line and I believe you might have been a bit too young to have mastered it then, but somehow ya might have gotten the hang of it Luke. lmao. A necessary skill i see as i try to learn linux, fortunately I never was scared of it, belonging to that generation of programmers that grew up with it. Yet perhaps it’s possible the dude that maintains your mail server is not as knowledgeable as you, or perhaps just doesn’t give a shit. Anyway awk is an old tool and not many even know about it. I know it’s universal in Linux/unix environments and even I who grew up with MS-DOS used a port of it. tho I basically only played with it some. It’s powerful and your post here clearly shows how much so, but I laughed my ass of reading that. I agree tho it was kinda rude of him to do ya that way, but ya know how people are!!