Mailbox Converter

About the converter

Suppose you had a developer preview of an upcoming operating system with some nifty search technology. Suppose the mail client of this system converted your e-mail boxes from their original "mbox" format to a new "emlx" format to support the nifty search technology. Then suppose that for some reason you wanted to go back to running the current release of the operating system, and you found that your e-mail boxes were no longer readable.

In such a scenario, you might want a script like this one.

I wrote this when I was running a developer preview of Mac OS X Tiger, decided to revert to Panther for a while, and needed to get my messages back into the older version of Mail. I'm posting it here in case others find they need to do something similar for whatever reason. You provide it with the path to some emlx-style mailboxes, and it converts them back into mbox files that can be imported into Mail on Mac OS X 10.3.

See the included Read Me file for more information.

Version history

This is version 1.2, which better handles mail headers that use tabs instead of spaces (thanks to Léonard Bouchet). Version 1.1 fixed a few problems with reading the From and Date fields from the emlx messages, supplied default values if the fields were not found, and displayed a summary at the end.

Download emlx2mbox.zip