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Univik Online MBOX Viewer
100% private. Runs only on your device
Evolution and KMail exports, Claws Mail and Sylpheed mailboxes, mutt and Alpine folders and the /var/mail spool, read right on the box that wrote them or on any other device.
Or pick it from your device. Messages open in this tab, on your own computer, phone or tablet. Your mailbox is never uploaded.
mbox was born on Unix and Linux mail programs still speak it. Evolution and KMail write it on export, Claws Mail and Sylpheed on request, mutt and Alpine as their native folders. The system spool in /var/mail is mbox too. This page reads all of them in a browser, with no client configured and nothing leaving the machine.
mboxo from old spools, mboxrd from modern clients, mboxcl with Content-Length lines. The tool detects the shape by content and splits correctly, whichever client wrote it.
Reading an old mailbox does not mean adding an account to Evolution or pointing mutt at it. Drop the file here and read.
The tool has Firefox or Chromium read the file from disk. Nothing is uploaded, which is the only acceptable answer for a copied spool file.
Keep one as .eml, grab an attachment or turn the list into a .csv, all without leaving the browser.
Short answer: the file reads the same on the box that wrote it and on a Windows PC, a Mac or a phone. Copy it over and load this page there.
Open this page in Firefox or Chromium and pick the file. No package to install, and it works on a server with a desktop as well as a laptop.
scp or copy the file to the PC and read it in Edge or Chrome. LF line endings are handled, so the count matches what mutt showed.
Copy it across and open it in Safari or Chrome. No need to import into the Mail app first.
Push the file to the phone through a share and open it here in the mobile browser. Handy for checking a server's root mail from the sofa.
The Linux container on a Chromebook can write mbox too. Copy the file to Files and open it here in Chrome, or see the Chromebook page.
Evolution moved its local folders to Maildir with version 3.0, so a current profile has no mbox in it. mbox from Evolution comes from an export or an older install.
Select messages in Evolution, or a whole folder, then choose Save as mbox. The file it writes is standard mboxrd and opens here with every attachment.
Evolution 2 kept real mbox under ~/.evolution/mail/local/, files named Inbox and Sent beside .ev-summary and .ibex.index files. Skip the index files and open the plain ones.
~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/, or ~/.var/app/org.gnome.Evolution/ for the flatpak, holds cur, new and tmp directories with one file per message. Those are not mailbox files. Export first, then open the export.
KDE's mail client used mbox by default in the KDE 3 days and switched to Maildir under Akonadi. Both kinds still turn up on old home directories.
KDE 3 stored folders as plain mbox in ~/Mail, with inbox, sent-mail, drafts and trash as files. Copy one out and it opens here as it is.
Modern KMail keeps local mail as Maildir under ~/.local/share/local-mail/. An mbox only appears if you added an mbox resource, and that one file is a normal mailbox.
Right click a message and Save As writes it as a single .mbox file. Several of those, or one from each folder, load together here from a folder pick.
Both clients store mail in MH format, one numbered file per message under ~/Mail. Both also have an mbox export built in.
In Claws Mail, File, then Export to mbox file, writes the chosen folder as one mailbox. Sylpheed has the same command. Those files open here with the right message count.
~/Mail/inbox/1, /2 and so on are single messages without a From line. Pick the folder here and each numbered file opens as a one message mailbox.
File, then Import mbox file, brings a mailbox from this page's world back into Claws. Handy after you have checked an old archive here.
The terminal clients never left mbox. Their folders are the format in its purest form, and they open here without a terminal.
Whatever folder and mbox point at in .muttrc, usually ~/Mail/ and ~/mbox, are plain mailboxes the tool reads as they are. A mutt user's saved folders open here one at a time or all together.
~/mail/saved-messages, ~/mail/sent-mail and any folder you created are mbox. Alpine's default local format has been this since the Pine days.
Since Emacs 23, Rmail keeps ~/RMAIL in mbox rather than the old Babyl format. An RMAIL file from a current Emacs opens here directly.
Local delivery from Postfix, Sendmail or Exim lands in one file per user. It is the oldest mbox of all.
Or /var/spool/mail/ on older systems. One file per account, mboxo or mboxrd depending on the delivery agent. Copy it out with cp and open the copy here. Cron output and root's warnings are often in there.
The spool file belongs to the user with group mail, so reading someone else's needs sudo. Copy it to your home first rather than pointing the browser at /var/mail directly.
procmail rules that deliver into ~/Mail/lists write mbox, and a Dovecot server configured for mbox stores each IMAP folder as a file. Both open here like any other mailbox.
Copy a file from ~/Mail, ~/mail or /var/mail. Or export a folder as mbox from Evolution, KMail or Claws Mail. Use cp so the original stays untouched.
Drag the file into the upload area, or use Select a folder on a ~/Mail directory to load every mailbox in it at once.
Open a message and use the Headers tab for Received and Message-ID lines. Anything worth keeping goes out as .eml, attachments as a zip.
This online page reads one Linux mailbox, or one folder of them, with nothing installed. For a whole ~/Mail tree at once, search through message bodies and printing, the free Univik MBOX Viewer for Windows does it on a PC.
| Feature | Online Linux Viewer | MBOX Viewer for Windows |
|---|---|---|
| Install needed | None, opens in the browser | 15 MB Windows setup |
| Operating system | Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook, iOS, Android | Windows 7 to 11 |
| Files uploaded | Never, runs on your device | Never, runs on your PC |
| ~/Mail tree | One folder at a time | Whole tree with subfolders |
| Search | Sender, subject, recipients | Message bodies too |
| Large spools | Read in pieces, multi GB files open | No size limit |
| Browser print of the open message | Direct printing | |
| Price | Free | Free |
Drop the file Evolution wrote with Save as mbox onto this page. It is standard mboxrd, so every message and attachment appears. If all you have is a current profile, export first, because the Maildir under .local/share/evolution is not a mailbox file.
Yes. KDE 3 KMail kept inbox, sent-mail, drafts and trash as mbox files in ~/Mail. Copy them anywhere and open them here. A modern Akonadi profile is Maildir instead, so from there use Save As on the messages you want.
Both. The mbox from File, then Export to mbox file, is the tidy route and gives one list. A raw MH folder works too: pick it with Select a folder and each numbered file opens as a one message mailbox with a switcher in the top bar.
Yes. A mutt folder or Alpine's saved-messages file is pure mbox with LF line endings, and the tool reads those on any system. scp the file across to the PC, load this page in Edge or Chrome and choose it. The count matches what mutt reported.
Copy it first, with cp /var/mail/you ~/spool.mbox, then open the copy here. The spool belongs to your user with group mail, and reading another account's file needs sudo. The copy keeps the browser away from the live file that Postfix is still writing to.
No. The browser reads the file from the local filesystem and sends nothing anywhere. No server sits in the loop. Pull the network and the page keeps reading offline, which is the test a sysadmin would run anyway.
Old spools are mboxo and qmail plus most modern clients write mboxrd. A few SVR4 tools wrote mboxcl with Content-Length headers. The tool checks each file's content rather than trusting a name, so you do not need to know which one you have.
Yes. Use Select a folder on ~/Mail and every mailbox in it loads, with the top bar to switch between them. Index and summary files that clients leave beside the mailboxes are ignored. For the whole tree merged into one list, use the Windows viewer.
From a mutt folder to a spool file to an Evolution export, it opens here with no client set up and nothing sent off the machine.
Choose a Linux mailbox file