Viewer for Thunderbird email files

Regnad Kcin · 01-13-2018, 06:27 AM

I am looking for a way to open and view Thunderbird email files like old Inbox and Sent files.

There is a way to load such files into Thunderbird but it is very messy.

I am looking for a way to open such files and view them.

Such files are too large for text editors like kate.

(I can open the files with joe).

Any suggestions are appreciated.

EYo · 01-13-2018, 07:45 AM

Slackware 14.2, I recently used kmail's importwizard to gather a bunch of sent-mail archives. kmail does show and index read-only mbox files just fine offline. I use mutt and notmuch with maildir folders currently, don't think I'll ever return to Mozilla.

The importwizard is a step-by-step thing, it is self-explanatory, hopefully. I had to wait patiently for a long time with no response from the gui (a few minutes with 8core CPU and 12G RAM, but eventually the import was complete.

Code:

importwizard --version
Qt: 4.8.7
KDE Development Platform: 4.14.32
importwizard: 4.14.10

These were thunderbird folders from 2009 burned to DVD...
I grabbed 7 files, smallest 567 messages, 35.8M. Every single one has a damned attachment. Aargh!
Largest file is 1704 messages, 107.2M again with the binary attachments. As far as I can tell, everything is there. Good job kmail.

Slackware 15.0 (current) Today I tried seamonkey -mail to open a 245Mb archive from 2005, attachments and all. I created a fake UnixMail account, restarted and browsed to the mbox folder. There are a bunch of blank messages but all the original data is intact. Good job seamonkey. Are they still part of Mozilla? If so, eat my words above. Thanks.

Regnad Kcin · 01-13-2018, 10:52 AM

This info about importwizard was quite helpful and I was able to solve one serious problem of finding a long lost email that was in a thunderbird Inbox.

It imported the mailboxes into kmail quite quickly for me
after I realized I needed to specify a destination.

I have grown increasingly unhappy with thunderbird.

Surely there is something better.

Thunderbird seems to get clunkier and provide less freedom of access with each iteration of "development".

montagdude · 01-13-2018, 11:21 AM

There's always mutt, which "sucks less" than other mail clients. I have no idea if it imports emails from Thunderbird, though.