Open mbox File?

Question

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.

Solution 1

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 <[email protected]> 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 .

formail -ds sed '1 s/^From .* <\(.*\)>/From \1/' <sent.mbox >sent-reformatted.mbox
mutt -f sent-reformatted.mbox

Solution 2

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

Solution 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...

Solution 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.

View more solutions

Comments

[h3.]

Mutt should be able to open an mbox file. It's normal to have a From line without a colon at the top: this is for the email's envelope. It's difficult to diagnose your problem without seeing the file contents. Of course I appreciate the file contents is probably too private to publish. Look at the file as a text file (for example with less). Is the From line followed by header lines (From:, Subject: and so on)? Is there a Lines: header, a Content-Length: header?

[chris]

It looks like this: pastebin.com/49fG0N7E I deleted the recipient, content and domain name.

[chris]

Do I have to copy the file to the Thunderbird profile? I don't want to change it.

[chris]

I appreciate your answer. Unfortunately, formail doesn't add this header. RFC 822 / 4155 knows nothing about it.

[chris]

After reformatting the file with formail, four (of a hundred) mails are displayed in mutt.

[h3.]

@chris How many files does formail -ds sh -c 'cat >$FILENO.mail' create? Can mutt read them as individual mailboxes containing a single mail?

[chris]

606 files are generated. But Mutt doesn't read them.

[h3.]

@chris Damn. Again, this is difficult to diagnose without seeing a mail. Can you take one of these single-mail files and edit out all private data, check that mutt still can't open it, and post it here?

[chris]

this is a simple mail without mime-multiparts: pastebin.com/2aQFgxe2 It contains German umlauts. Do they make trouble?

[chris]

I deleted the umlauts. Even so, the mail isn't displayed.

[h3.]

@chris Ok, I've reproduced this and found the problem: Mutt doesn't like it when the envelope From line isn't of the form From [email protected] trailer text. In particular, it ignores a line where the envelope from address is John Doe <[email protected]>. Now I'm going to see how to fix this.

[h3.]

@chris I don't know whether it's a bug in mutt or in the program that produced this mailbox, but see my answer for a fix.

[chris]

Thank you very much. I'll clean the mbox files up with your script.

[ThorSummoner]

I dislike that by opening the mbox file, its really importing the file.

[prashanth]

Yes. I was able to open mbox file in Thunderbird. This link provided the steps to be followed. commons.lbl.gov/display/[email protected]/…

[aliopi]

@prashanth 's link is a working solution. I could download my gmail archive as an .mbox file (takeout.google.com/settings/takeout) and open it with Thunderbird. All you have to do is place the .mbox-file in the Local Folder path on your file system. Before that you must create at least a newsgroup account with your real email adress (write anything as the news server address, it doesn't matter). Restart Thunderbird and then you have a new folder with all your mails and attachements.

[JanKanis]

All the import/export extension does is copy the mbox file to thunderbird's local profile folder. You can also do that manually.

[Slava Fomin II]

This is the best answer. I was able to view all my 100K messages downloaded from GMail backup this way. Thanks.