How to convert thunderbird inbox file to eml

Question

I got a bare Inbox file (that without any extension) from thunferbird that was copied from another machine. I do not have any info about account; only a few more .msf files. I need a way to convert the file to separate eml files. How would i do this?

Answer 1

The mailbox is in the Inbox file, using the mboxrd format. The format is very simple; all messages are simply concatenated together, with From_ headers added and with existing such lines in the body escaped.

The Inbox file can be given to any "mbox to eml" or "mbox to Maildir" conversion tool, or even to a simple script that splits upon /^From / lines.

Randomly-accessing a mbox mailbox can be very slow when it grows large, so Inbox.msf is a "summary" of the mailbox in the Mork format (which is not much faster).

The .msf files are only useful to Thunderbird and can be discarded otherwise.

Answer 2

did you try mbox2eml? There is also other utility from different author with the same name here.