An MBOX viewer? (read that as view MBOX files without importing them into an email client?)

[Robert M]

Chak,

Good idea. I tried that, too. But, it's like accessing the messages via a text editor. Cumbersome. I'm going to import the MBOXes into an alternate email client and be done with it.

Robert

[Chakravartin]

Robert M wrote:
Chak,

Good idea. I tried that, too. But, it's like accessing the messages via a text editor. Cumbersome. I'm going to import the MBOXes into an alternate email client and be done with it.

Not sure why you think it's clunky. I found it slicker than Apple Mail. I think I'm gonna archive all my old emails this way.

[Robert M]

Chak,

I assumed Quicklook would allow me to view the MBOX file(s), just like it does in a text editor. Just tried it and all it does is bring up a picture of the folder or the file itself. You can't look at the actual contents of the MBOX file. That definitely doesn't work for me.

Robert

[Chakravartin]

Robert M wrote:
Chak,

I assumed Quicklook would allow me to view the MBOX file(s), just like it does in a text editor. Just tried it and all it does is bring up a picture of the folder or the file itself. You can't look at the actual contents of the MBOX file. That definitely doesn't work for me.

What OS are you running?

In 10.8.3, I see the whole nicely-formatted message with styled-text and such.

[Robert M]

Chak,

Same OS. Are you looking at a single message in a file or an MBOX filled with thousands of messages? I'm looking at an MBOX with thousands of messages.

Robert

[Chakravartin]

Don't look at the messages. Don't bother opening an MBOX folder.

Put the MBOX folders together in another folder and use Spotlight to search the parent folder. You can search by any text in the messages or by date or by any of the other Spotlight criteria.

Your messages will appear in the search results, which you can easily organize by subject or date. Use QuickLook to view any message that turns up in the search-results. Browse through messages in QuickLook by using the arrow keys on your keyboard.

Once you try it, you'll wonder why everyone doesn't do this.

[Robert M]

Chak,

Still doesn't work. It just list the single MBOX file that contains the text, not the individual messages in the file. I checked the Spotlight settings and it didn't offer any options for listing the messages themselves.

Robert

[Izzy]

I know this thread is a little old, but I was trying to do something similar. My solution was to use Mozilla's Thunderbird email client.

Here's a link explaining how to get Thunderbird to read/use a local mbox files... but basically install thunderbird, find the directory that it uses for local mail, and move as many mbox files as you want there.

https://commons.lbl.gov/display/~jwelche...hunderbird

[k9gardner]

This is an oldish thread, but I came to it today looking for alternatives to what I'm about to provide here. It seems that at least a few others are in the same boat as I was, and outside of reloading the mbox files into a mail program, nobody's offering anything.

There is an alternative text editor though - UltraEdit - which I used to use in the Windows world, and it totally rocks with large files (multi-GB). It is now also available for the Mac.

Instead of loading the entire file into memory like BBEdit does, UltraEdit allows you to load only sections at a time into memory, sort of scrolling through the file. When you reach the end of the data loaded into memory, it dumps what's at the other end and loads more data. (Of course I'm not giving a technical explanation of what's going on under the covers, I don't know. I'm just describing the observable behavior).
You can control how much memory is dedicated to the files, which kind of sets the width of your "window" into the data file.

An email correspondence with the company (IDM Computer Solutions Inc) several years ago told me that the Mac version works the same way, but I had never used the Mac version until now. I've just downloaded it - actually leveraging my initial investment in the Windows version of the product with upgrade pricing after all these years, and having the ability to install and activate both Windows and Mac versions at the same time - and it works. For example, I've just opened an 800MB file, some 10 million lines of data from an mbox file, performed a substring search and found all 104 occurrences in 20-25 seconds.

This program does ~not~ provide the ability to preview images in stream, so far as I know, it just shows the base64 encoded data. There may be some way to preview, I'm not sure.

Seems like it will solve my problem, anyway… what about yours?!