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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.

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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? – Gilles Mar 18 '12 at 19:29
It looks like this: pastebin.com/49fG0N7E I deleted the recipient, content and domain name. – chris Mar 18 '12 at 20:46

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

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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I appreciate your answer. Unfortunately, formail doesn't add this header. RFC 822 / 4155 knows nothing about it. – chris Mar 18 '12 at 22:04
After reformatting the file with formail, four (of a hundred) mails are displayed in mutt. – chris Mar 18 '12 at 22:11
@chris How many files does formail -ds sh -c 'cat >$FILENO.mail' create? Can mutt read them as individual mailboxes containing a single mail? – Gilles Mar 18 '12 at 22:20
1  
@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 something@somewhere trailer text. In particular, it ignores a line where the envelope from address is John Doe <add@ress>. Now I'm going to see how to fix this. – Gilles Mar 19 '12 at 20:57
1  
@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. – Gilles Mar 19 '12 at 22:12
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up vote 1 down vote

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

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Do I have to copy the file to the Thunderbird profile? I don't want to change it. – chris Mar 18 '12 at 20:50
up vote 1 down vote

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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