An Unusual Alpine Challenge?

[Linux for blind general discussion]

Hi All: I did ask in comp.mail.pine about this, with no responses. I had 
lost quite a lot of text articles which I had been collecting all the way 
back to when I first got on CompuServe in 1994. A great place of finding 
News related wire stories were in Clari.net Usenet groups. Well, Giganews 
still has postings mostly back to 2004, some from 2003. However, we found 
an archive of articles from the 90s which are in .mbox format. I wanted to 
simulate looking at these stories as single articles the way they came off 
the news server, but these .mbox files are sometime 19thousand lines or 
13MB. Sure there is Linux software to split these, but they are not 
maintaining their orriginal article dates. I think the package is git 
mail-split.
So I created a new folder in Alpine, gave it a path where these articles 
are housed, but not only is Alpine still seeing the large .mbox file, but 
Alpine is noticing these as read only sub-directories, which in reality 
they are individual names of Clari news groups.
Can any1 please suggest how better to work with these? I would want to 
aggregate groups of news stories to year related directories, then nuke 
them-and-go on to the next group as you would in an actual news reader. I 
tried naming these files differently thinking I can fool Alpine in to 
rendering them as I was hoping. Thanks so much in advance for any-and-all 
suggestions. There is another more complicate Debian package, mb2mdir  but 
it just gives these files strings of numbers-and-letters.
Chime