Problem

Someone restored my old emails and told me these are in mbox format. How can i import them in Thunderbird?

Solution

mbox is a format which concatenates and stores all emails as plain text in a single file. Therefore you could just open the individual mbox file with a text editor if you just need a sender email address or a link from an old email. But if you still need the whole structure you have to import the mbox file.

Import

Unfortunately, there seems to be no straightforward way to ask Thunderbird to open or import an Mbox mail file directly.

Say you have an mbox file, and would like to view it in Thunderbird. For this example, we will view the file in a "temp-mbox" folder under Thunderbird's "Local Folders". The convoluted way which seems to work goes like this:

• In Thunderbird, under Local Folders, create the new temp-mbox folder.

• Exit Thunderbird.

• Find your Local Folders directory in your profile. It may be something like ~/.thunderbird/random-string.default/Mail/Local Folders/. In there, you will find a temp-mbox and a temp-mbox.msf file.

• Overwrite temp-mbox with your mbox file.
• delete the temp-mbox.msf index file.
• Re-open Thunderbird

source

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