What do you understand by MBOX (MailBOX) file?

MBOX file format is the short name of MailBOX. MBOX is a file format for a text file used to organize and store mail messages. MailBOX file are used in several email client such as:-

• Thunderbird
• Entourage
• Opera mailboxes
• Netscape
• Seamonkey
• Evolution Mail
• Postbox mailboxes
• Eudora Mail
• Sparrow Mail
• Sylpheed

Mbox is a well supported by a number of e-mail applications. Each mbox file represent a set of email messages that are sequentially and grouped into a folder. MBOX messages are stored in the source format, e.g plain text may be stored as ASCII or Unicode, binary data is stored as Base64-encoded text.

It’s MIME type is text/x-mailbox. MBOX format is a plain text file which contains the email as 7-bit ASCII text & the rest things such as attachments are stored an encoded format.

• STEP1: Go to MBOX file, right click on this file
• STEP2: Select Open with option.
• STEP3: Select the compatible application that open MBOX file. (If compatible application not available to open MBOX format file, So go to STEP 4)
• STEP3: Use MBOX viewer tool to open mbox format file without the need of email client.

Several Common Variants of MailBOX file are:-

• Mboxo uses the constant string in place of sender’s mail address.
• Mboxrd is variant of mboxo mailbox format.
• Mboxcl format is used by unix System V mailboxes. Mboxcl2 is a similar format to “mboxcl”.

User can easily extract data from MBOX File Format. It is possibility when you successfully extract mbox data file from any email clients such as apple mail, mulberry, thunderbird, opera mail etc. but user are unable to open and read MBOX data file, so In this case third party tool help to extract MailBOX file ad save in different format like as (csv, pdf ) etc.