# format of mail.app's mail isn't mbox?!?!??!??!?!



## toisanji (May 20, 2002)

I'm trying to read mail.app's mail with mail(not pine or other client, only mail), but I can't seem to read the files in ~/Library/Mail/* I thoguht that mboxes were stored as plain text, but those files are all binary, how can I read the mail with the command line?
Can someone please give me an example of reading mail.app's mail with /usr/bin/mail?
Here are some useful discussions I found. One says mail.app's mail is mbox, antoher says it sint. I think it isn't. http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001606 http://forums.macnn.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001793
TIA
Jason


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## lethe (May 20, 2002)

mail.app stores email messages in plain text format, but each email is a seperate file, making it impossible, or at least impractical to use mail to read them.  you can find these files inside the .mbox package corresponding to your mailbox


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## howardm4 (May 20, 2002)

On my system, its in std mbox flat single
file format and all I needed to do was
kick off mutt (my preferred client).

Your 'file per email' theory sounds like MH 
and mail.app doesn't do that.


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## scruffy (May 21, 2002)

In pine, I just made softlinks from the standard saved-messages and outbox to my Mail.app inboxes.  They're buried pretty deep in folders, but they're there.

Only thing is, Mail.app keeps a separate index, and of course pine doesn't update that.  For some reason, every time I use pine, Mail thinks it has hundreds of unread messages.


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## lethe (May 21, 2002)

howard:  what is MH?  my mail.app definitely does not keep my mail in mbox file format.  it is seperate files organized by directory.  i don t know why mine is not the same as yours.  i will do a little investigating perhaps.

here is a page about benefits of not using directories over flat files

http://www.courier-mta.org/mbox-vs-maildir/


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