Merging and filtering Mbox-files

The development of MBXMERGE is based on the MBS2MBX program. Therefore, you probably should also read the documentation of MBS2MBX for getting the whole picture. And it also saves me the time of giving extensive explanations ;-)

MBXMERGE basically merges Mbox files. Now, for a pure merging operation, there is absolutely no need for a separate application like this one. But, MBXMERGE can also filter your Mbox files: you can specify criteria to filter out specific email messages, and these will be stored in separate output Mbox files. This way, no single email is lost, but your Mbox files can be reorganized efficiently.

So what filtering does MBXMERGE perform? The output consists of several new Mbox files, for email messages with missing "From" or "Date" headers, for messages containing newsgroup headers and for ordinary email messages. In addition, all duplicate email messages are stored in a separate Mbox file. Optionally, you can filter out email messages that involve a user-specified email address. For this purpose, there is a special file called myaccounts.ini in which you can specify the email addresses in the following way:
Email=my.address@someserver.de

Preparation

The first thing to install is Python, if you don't have it already (Version 2.x). Next, install MBXMERGE by unzipping the archive in an appropriate place on your system. To run it, simply double-click the mbxmerge.pyw file.

Copy all Mbox files that need to be merged to a specific directory. This directory is the source path that you specify in MBXMERGE, and all Mbox files in that directory will be merged together, regardless of their name or file extension.

Usage

Using MBXMERGE is very simple: you specify the source path where MBXMERGE should look for Mbox files, and the destination path where the merged Mbox files should be created.

The MBXMERGE interface looks like this:

On the screenshot, you can see an example of a finished merge operation. There were 4 Mbox files in the source path:

a.mbx
c
mbox_b.mbx
o7mails.mbx

As you can see, the name of the Mbox files does not matter. In the myaccounts.ini config file, the email address test@onlinehome.de was specified. For this email address, 1185 email messages were found and stored in the test_onlinehome_de.mbx Mbox file.

For a more detailed description of the output files, you can read the documentation of MBS2MBX.

Download

I hope the program works for you!

Questions or comments: just send them by e-mail.