Import and display email messages

April 9, 2015 7:53 PM

Is there a Mac OS X program that will import email messages from text or RTF source files and display them with the fields in a grid, so that they can be sorted or filtered by date, sender, recipient, etc.? This seems rather basic but I am striking out.
posted by megatherium to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

If the text files with the email messages are in mbox format - ie, sequential messages that all start with a From line and end with a blank line - you can simply import those files into the Apple Mail application and sort the messages there.

The Mozilla Thunderbird application also can import mbox files or the exported files of many different mail programs.

If the messages aren't in mbox format or one of the formats Mail or Thunderbird recognize, you'd generally need to find a way of converting them into mbox format. That's going to vary depending on specifically how the files you have are structured and the way the message headers are (or are not) organized in their current format.
posted by eschatfische at 10:15 PM on April 9, 2015 [2 favorites]

Sounds to me like you need a database program like Filemaker.
posted by unliteral at 11:57 PM on April 9, 2015

Response by poster: In one collection I have about 40 RTF files with pasted messages, one per file. In another I have a bunch (maybe hundreds) pasted in a Word file.
posted by megatherium at 2:26 PM on April 10, 2015