plainfolder → Mail → MBOX
Open an MBOX file without importing it anywhere
Google Takeout hands you a file with your whole mailbox in it. Drop it here and read it — three hundred thousand messages open in about seven seconds.
No server processing
No account
No daily limits
What a .mbox file is
Mbox is one long file with every message stacked inside it, which is how Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Google Takeout give your mail back. Nothing on a normal computer opens it directly.
The usual advice is to import the file into a mail client, which means creating an account you do not want, waiting, and then deleting it again — for what is often a single search.
What you can do here
Read and searchOpen the file, search by subject, address or text, filter by year, sender and attachment type.
Take things outSave every attachment as one zip, or the messages themselves as separate files.
Keep a copyCSV, XLSX, ZIP, EML, MBOX, PDF, HTML, TXT, JSON — whichever format outlives the one you have.
Convert MBOX to something else
Questions
- How large a file can I open?
- Half a gigabyte is comfortable on a normal computer; the limit is your device's memory, not a plan.
- Does the .tgz from Google Takeout work?
- Yes, as does a gzipped .mbox — it is decompressed as it is read.
- Can I find duplicates?
- Yes. Archives that were exported twice usually hold each message several times, and duplicates are detected by message id or by fingerprint.