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chris
Asked: 2012-03-19 11:19:53 +0800 CST

Open mbox File?

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How to open a mbox file? Mutt displays no mails when calling mutt -f sent.mbox.

The mbox format is "From" without colon.

Is there any mbox viewer for Linux?

Thank you in advance.

email mbox

5 Answers

  1. Any text editor is capable of opening .mbox. Besides text editors Mozilla Thunderbird can open them too.

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  2. Best Answer

    The first line of the mail is the “envelope From line”. It begins with the 5 characters From␣ where ␣ is a space character. This is normal.

    From Christian xxx <cg@xxx> Mon May  15 20:22:35 2010

    What is unusual is that the email address is between <…>. This is unusual. I don't know if it's against the RFCs or not, but I can see Mutt chokes on it.

    You should get a valid mailbox (as in, one that Mutt can parse) by processing the mailbox file through the formail command from procmail Install procmail.

    formail -ds sed '1 s/^From .* <\(.*\)>/From \1/' <sent.mbox >sent-reformatted.mbox
mutt -f sent-reformatted.mbox
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  3. After a bit of nightmare on Windows with Firefox, where the .mbox gets open but only the first message is available, I found that Evolution works well: I created a new folder and then from File\Import... (I'm from Italy, the menu it's actually Importa...) I was able to read that old messages...

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  4. In thunderbird you can open the file by placing it in thunderbirds local profile folder, under $HOME/.thunderbird/<profilename>.default/Mail/Local Folders/ An .mbox file there will be picked up by Thunderbird and displayed. See also the detailed instructions linked by prashanth in a different comment.

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  5. In order to view an mbox file in Thunderbird, I needed the following:

    • add the Import/Export extension, otherwise the "import" option in the Tools menu did not give me the option to import a file (only data, etc., from another account/app); and
    • to use an account which was configured for POP, not IMAP (since the import into IMAP is not possible -- at least with the mbox file I was importing).

    With those two conditions in place, everything worked well, and the file was available "as mail" in Thunderbird after import (with attachments intact).

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