didenko / mboxrd

Split message archived from Google Takeout into individual `.eml` message files

Purpose

Split email archives downloaded from Google Takeout (Download Your Data) service into individual emails. Based on experimentation it looks like Google uses the mboxrd dialect of mbox format with CRLF lines as discussed at the Wikipedia mbox article

License

The project is licensed under the BSD 3-Clause License - see the LICENSE.txt file included with the package.

Using the mboxrd package

The package provides both libraries and a buildable executable. See the code documentation on using the libraries.

Using the mboxrd_split executable

The executable takes the following parameters:

-dir  <name>     : A directory to put the resulting messages to.
                   The directory must exist before running the program.

-mbox <name>     : An mbox file to process and split into messages.

-email <address> : An email which correspondence to be captured. Only
                   the actual address should be provided.

The program does not preserve unfinished last line of the last message in the archive. In the resulting files all message lines end with CRLF after the processing.

During the processing it creates temporary message files and then moves them into the UTC-timestamped .eml file. If the destination filename is already taken by another message, then the later message does not override it. It is left in the temporary file and the error is printed to stderr.

Also a message stays in a temporary file if the program fails to construct a name for the message file. Some forwarded messages, for example, lack the Date: header.

mboxrd's Issues

Process hangs on exit

Filters miss multi-line header matches

Headers like these are missed:

Cc: "User Name" <[email protected]>,
    <[email protected]>,
    "'Colleague'" <[email protected]>

Windows binary

Dear Vlad,
Could you be so kind to generate .exe for the rest of us who are mere Windows users w/o compiler?

Make filtering CL parameter optional

Temp file rename fails on Windows

Diagnostic printed:

2015/10/12 20:33:24 Message error: Problem renaming "dir\\_msg_303569788" into
"dir/timestamp_suffix.eml", the file may have either of the names. Error: rename
dir\_msg_303569788 dir/timestamp_suffix.eml: The process cannot access the file
because it is being used by another process.

Allow for multiple saved email filters

Currently mboxrd only allows to specify an email to be checked for in sender or receiver header for message to be saved - or no filter at all. It would be nice to have multiple combinable filters.

Recursively extract attachments from multipart MIME messages