[SLUG] Converting Outlook Express DBX files to MBOX format

[Paul Teasdale]

I have posted this message in order that it may help someone in dropping 
Windows and moving entirely to Linux and concerns converting e-mails from the 
Outlook Express DBX format to the MBOX format used by most Linux e-mail 
clients.

As some of you may know I still have a Windows 95 PC with an e-mail archive on 
it going back to around the mid 90's (right up to current date). The e-mail 
client I use to view this archive is Outlook Express 5.5. Much of the 
information is junk but I can't be bothered to weed it out. That said I can't 
just ditch the archive as I would like to keep many of the e-mails that are 
contained within.

For a while now I have been attempting to export the archive from Windows 95 
to Linux but all the tools I have found 'drop' e-mail especially from large 
folders containing many 100's of e-mails. A good example of this is SLUG.dbx 
which contains all the Scarborough Linux User Group chatter since I joined 
SLUG. Many tools I have tried don't successfully convert all the e-mails 
within this folder and I always seemed to end up with fewer e-mails than 
actually exist. To be honest some of this appeared to be due to duplicated 
e-mails but after taking this into account things still didn't add up.

I have now found a tool that seems to be very successful (100%?) at converting 
the Outlook Express DBX format into MBOX format. This tool runs under 
Windows, via the command-line and is called DBXCONV.

So from the command-line:

dbxconv -mboxrd SLUG.dbx

will create a new file called SLUG.mbx containing all the same e-mails that 
were in the SLUG.dbx but in the mbox format. Also note that the command can 
be used with wildcards so:

dbxconv -mboxrd *.dbx

will copy and convert all the dbx files within the current directory into mbox 
format.

The resulting mbox files can be read by many Linux mail clients including 
Pine, Mutt and Kmail to name but a few.

You can get dbxconv from:

http://people.freenet.de/ukrebs/dbxconv.html

Hope this helps someone,

Regards,

Paul.

PS: Now I have no excuse to keep Windows 95 what-so-ever :)

-- 
Linux User #351704 (http://counter.li.org)
Scarborough LUG Member (http://www.scarborough.lug.org.uk)
Another Happy Slacker!! (http://www.slackware.com)