Conversion of AOL e-mail archives for use with MacOSX?

February 7, 2004 2:03 PM

Conversion of AOL e-mail archives: When I was young I used AOL e-mail for one and a half year (AOL Version 3 on Win95). I still have this Win95-Box with a working installation of the AOL software and can access these mails one by one. Now a MacOSX user I'd like to import those archives into the Mail.app or make them at least accesible in some open text format. Any ideas? (I came across this service that claims to do just this, but I don't want to hand out my private e-mail archives).
posted by meikel to computers & internet (3 comments total)

You should be able to open the PFC file in a text editor and remove the odd formatting bits by hand. The emails themselves are in plain text, so after you clean it up, you'll be left with a standard mbox spool that *should* be importable by your mail client.
posted by cmonkey at 10:42 AM on February 8, 2004

Some leads you may wish to investigate further:

http://members.aol.com/markjx/mljsoft.htm
http://www.aoleave.com
http://members.aol.com/fvongordon/pfc/
posted by Danelope at 11:53 AM on February 8, 2004

Danelope, I bow before you! Just extracted my first 1000 e-mails from the AOL archives and am well impressed. While the first link lead to nothing (except for eating an e-mail adress for registration), the tool of your second link is absolutely what I am looking for. Since it is written in Java I could even do the conversion on MacOSX and afterwards import the mbox right into the mail.app. I am so happy I kept the files until Matt brought us Ask.Mefi
posted by meikel at 1:05 PM on February 8, 2004