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

T

toisanji

Registered
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
 
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
 
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.
 
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.
 
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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