How to get MBOX mailboxes into Eudora (including attachments)?

September 2, 2007 3:24 PM

How to get MBOX mailboxes into Eudora (including attachments)?

Hi. I have a bunch of MBOX-format mailboxes I've downloaded off my mail host using Imapsize.

I want to be able to access these offline using a fresh installation of Eudora.

When I bring the MBOX files into the Eudora folder, they seem to work okay, as long as the messages have no attachments.

When there are attachments, though, Eudora does not seem happy - the attached files don't show up, and the message bodies include a huge encoded mess.

Does anyone know a way to import mbox-format mailboxes into Eudora that avoids this problem? (Free solutions are best, of course...)

posted by ManInSuit to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Do you mean mbox as in unix style mailboxes? I'm fairly sure attachments are kept separate from that file.
posted by phrontist at 4:04 PM on September 2, 2007

They are probably stored uuencoded in the message itself. There appear to be some attachment-harvesting plugins for Thunderbird, which uses the same format. You might look into those.
posted by rhizome at 5:02 PM on September 2, 2007

Aid4mail is a swiss army knife of email.
posted by __ at 5:42 PM on September 2, 2007

phrontist - yes. I think the files I'm working with are unix-style mailboxes. But I'm pretty sure they contain the attachments, encoded right into the mbox file. (Which is how it's usually handled, but not how it's handled in Eudora).

___ - Aid4Mail sounds good (though not free). I don't suppose you happen to know if it deals specifically w. the Eudora/Mbox/Attachment issue?
posted by ManInSuit at 6:05 PM on September 2, 2007

after reading around the problem seems to be that while eudora uses mbox files, it separates out attachments to a separate location. so you're right that your current (standard) mbox contains them, but eudora doesn't expect them there.

(i couldn't find any software that does the conversion to eudora although some do exist to go back to standard mbox format).
posted by andrew cooke at 6:18 PM on September 2, 2007

FWIW, I spent the money on Aid4Mail and it worked beautifully for me. I migrated 10 years of PMMail* emails over to Thunderbird.

* old OS/2 then Windows email program, kicked ass, I miss it so bad
posted by intermod at 9:31 PM on September 2, 2007

What OS? In MacOS, I just used Eudora Mailbox Cleaner to solve a similar problem (converting thunderbird mbox's with attachments to Mail.app), but it should do mbox-to-Eudora too. If you're on Windows, you could try Eudora Rescue.
posted by hedgehog at 9:15 PM on September 3, 2007

emailchemy may work for you. I've used it in the past to convert between Eudora and Outlook. It claims compatibility with a bunch of e-mail formats.
posted by edjusted at 2:25 PM on September 5, 2007