Comments on: How should I convert a Thunderbird inbox into text files?

Question: How should I convert a Thunderbird inbox into text files?

eisenkr — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 11:57:48 -0800

What's the best way to export all of the emails in a Thunderbird inbox to text files, one text file per email?

I'm planning on doing some linguistic analysis of emails and need to take a Thunderbird inbox and convert it into text files before I get to work. Google searches have revealed many mbox (which I think Thunderbird uses) parsers of, I am sure, varying quality. I'd love to skip the endless trial and error stage and start with the perfect tool. What's the best way to convert a Thunderbird inbox to text files?

ps - I'm comfortable using Perl and Python if you guys think a scripting solution is best.

By: zippy

zippy — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:07:36 -0800

mbox is an old and well-understood format, so I'd go with a solution that's been around for some time and trust it.

Perl's MessageParser class should do what you want.

By: bizwank

bizwank — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:14:54 -0800

What OS? On XP, you can install a generic "print to file" printer, select all the messages in the Inbox and print them directly to individual text files using that printer.

By: gmarceau

gmarceau — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:34:45 -0800

Thunderbird stores mail as mbox, Sylpheed stores them as Maildir, which is essentially one file per message.

So, if you just install Sylpheed and use the file/import to import your mbox file, you will be done.

By: good in a vacuum

good in a vacuum — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:28:38 -0800

I recently exported a few years' worth of email to .eml format from Thunderbird using the SmartSave extension. An .eml file is basically a text file that includes some header information at the beginning. I think from there you could just do a batch rename of all your newly-created files (*.eml -> *.txt).

By: ochenk

ochenk — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 13:40:27 -0800

good in a vacuum FTW!!

I've been looking to do this for a while. I just installed SmartSave, and it looks like it does great job. You can even configure it to use the .txt extension automatically.

By: eisenkr

eisenkr — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:55:58 -0800

Thanks guys! Now I just have to strip out all the html people shove in their email and I'll be ready to go.