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I have an MBOX file created by dragging a folder from Outlook (For Mac v.16) into Finder (because the Export wizard in Outlook For Mac only generates OLM files).

I can look at the MBOX contents as plain text, and it looks sane. I would like to verify the number of messages contained. But mailx doesn't seem to see any messages:

% mailx -f archive.mbox Mail version 8.1 6/6/93. Type ? for help. "archive.mbox": 0 messages ? f No applicable messages ? h No applicable messages ?

I realize it's a very old version of mailx, but that is what shipped with the Mac.

How does mailx expect messages to be delimited in the MBOX file? Could I fix this with a simple find-replace?

wemily
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It could be that mailx objects to DOS linefeeds or some other problem with the export from Outlook. The format should otherwise be very simple; records start with a "From " line which is followed by the message headers, a blank line, and then the message body and I think another blank line before the next "From " record. So to count the number of records

grep -c '^From ' archive.mbox

should suffice, as that pattern may not appear in a message body (this is why you may see "From" in messages prefixed with some character when using mailbox files).

There are other tools that can parse mailbox files e.g. Mail::Box (which I have not used) that might have better error messages than mailx.

thrig
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  • Thanks! You are right. Replacing carriage returns with newlines fixed it. In my case, sed $'s/\\\r/\\\n/g' archive.mbox > fixed-archive.mbox – wemily Oct 19 '18 at 20:34