MBOX to TXT — a plain readable copy of the whole archive
Turn an mbox archive into plain text: every message with its date, sender, subject and body, in one file anything can read.
About this conversion
Plain text is the format with no version, no licence and no program that has to still exist. An mbox saved this way becomes one file that a search tool, a script or a person with Notepad can go through — useful when an archive has to be handed over, kept for years, or fed into something that does not speak mail.
Just want to look inside it?
The same tool without converting anything: open a .mbox file and read it.
You are not locked into TXT
The file is parsed once and stays open, so the format is picked at the end rather than the beginning: the same .mbox can leave here as CSV, XLSX, ZIP, EML, PDF, HTML or JSON. Before that you can search it by subject or address, filter by year, sender and attachment type, mark the duplicates and look through the archive overview.
Questions
- What happens to attachments?
- They are listed by name and size under each message. To save the files themselves, use the zip export instead.
- Is HTML formatting kept?
- No — that is the point of this format. Formatted messages are flattened to their text, which is what makes the file searchable by anything.
- How large an archive can I convert?
- Large ones are written in pieces as they are read, so the limit is your own disk rather than memory.