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Univik Online Maildir Viewer
100% private. Your mail stays local
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A free online Maildir viewer for mail from Linux servers. Open a Maildir or Maildir++ folder from Dovecot, Courier, Postfix or qmail and read every message, its headers and attachments in your browser in seconds. No install, and nothing you open is ever sent anywhere.
Or pick it from your device. Every message is opened right there on your machine, phone or tablet. The files stay put.
Plenty of sites that open mail files push them to a server first. This one never does. It is a light-weight program your browser runs by itself: it reads each message file out of your Maildir folder and shows it on screen. Your mail is seen by nobody else.
A mailbox is full of private things: contracts, invoices, passwords, notes between people. Here none of that travels. No server sees it, no account is made, no copy is kept. Even the tracking pixels hidden in a message wait, blocked, until you say otherwise.
Computers and phones both: Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook, Android and iPad. A current Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari is all it takes, with no mail server needed.
Inline photos land where they belong, inside the message itself. A PDF, an Office file, a zip, whatever else came attached, each sits one click away behind a Save button that keeps the real file name.
Point the viewer at the top Maildir folder and it walks the cur, new and tmp subfolders and every dot-folder such as .Sent and .Trash. It lists each message with subject, sender and date. You can sort and search.
Quick answer: Univik Online Maildir Viewer opens a Maildir or Maildir++ folder on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook, Android and iPad. A recent browser is all you need. There is no mail server to run, and the mail never leaves the device.
Mail pulled off a Linux server lands on a Windows PC as a pile of files with no extension, and nothing on the PC knows how to open them. Drop the Maildir folder on this page and read every message in Edge or Chrome, no mail server needed.
Apple Mail will not read a raw Maildir from a server. In Safari or Chrome, point it at the folder and read the mail and its attachments, even where the Mac has no account set up.
You do not have to set up Dovecot or Courier to look inside an old Maildir. On Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint or any Linux at all, open the folder in Firefox or Chromium and the body, the headers and the attachments all show up in the browser.
ChromeOS has no mail server and no reader for server mail. This page fills that need. Pick the folder from Files or Google Drive and it comes up in Chrome, layout and pictures included.
Chrome, Firefox and Samsung Internet all handle it, on tablets and phones alike. Zip the Maildir into Downloads or Google Drive first, then open the .zip. It all happens on the phone, so even airplane mode is fine.
On iPadOS, Safari lays out all three panels: the list, the details, the zoom and the download menu. Keep the Maildir as a .zip in the Files app and open it in one step.
The Maildir format is what most Linux mail servers write to disk. A folder copied from Dovecot, Courier, Postfix, qmail or an old cPanel or Plesk account opens here the same way, cur, new and tmp folders included.
Web hosts hand you account mail as a Maildir inside a backup archive. Unzip it, point the viewer at the mail folder and read what a leaver or a closed account left behind, with no server to rebuild.
In a Maildir every email is its own file, saved to the RFC 5322 and MIME mail standards. What the mail server wrote to disk is exactly what shows up, one message at a time.
Each message opens on two tabs. The HTML tab draws the mail the way the sender laid it out, colors and pictures included. The Text tab gives you the words on their own, ready to copy. A Raw tab keeps the exact source for anyone who wants it.
The sender, the To and Cc names, the Reply-To, the subject, the date and the Message-ID sit across the top. One tab over is the long list the servers wrote: every Received line, the DKIM result and the rest.
A photo or a signature built into a message appears right where the sender dropped it. Attached documents, spreadsheets, zip files and audio clips each carry their own Save button and their own name.
Modern UTF-8 mail and the code pages of decades past both read cleanly: Shift_JIS and ISO-2022-JP for Japanese, GB2312, GBK and Big5 for Chinese, EUC-KR for Korean, KOI8-R for Cyrillic, plus Hebrew, Arabic and Thai. Text held as base64 or quoted-printable comes back as plain words on its own.
Thousands of little files become one clean list. Sort by date, sender or subject, keep only mail with attachments and search across every message, the wording of the body included.
A picture a newsletter pulls from a remote server can quietly report that the mail was opened. The viewer keeps those pictures back behind a Load remote images button, so opening old mail tells the sender nothing at all.
Press Choose Maildir folder and pick the top folder, or drag it onto the drop area above. A .zip of the Maildir works too, and so does a handful of single message files.
The left column fills with subjects, each showing its sender and date. Click one to open it, switch among the HTML, Text and Raw tabs, then move down the list with the arrow keys.
Hit the Save button on any attachment under the subject, or open the Attachments tab on the right, to keep pictures, PDFs and the rest under their own names.
Both tools are Univik's. This online page is the one for reading a Maildir on any device. The Univik Maildir Converter for Windows turns a whole Maildir into PST, PDF, MBOX and other file types in one pass.
| Feature | Online Maildir Viewer | Univik Maildir Converter |
|---|---|---|
| Install needed | None, it is a web page | A quick install for Windows |
| Operating system | Any device with a browser, phones as well | Runs on Windows 11, 10, 8 and 7 |
| Files uploaded | No, all of it runs on your device | No, all of it runs on your device |
| Mail server needed | No | No |
| Output | Read on screen, save attachments, export single HTML copies | PST, PDF, MBOX and more file types |
| Whole Maildir at once | Opens it, one message at a time | Converts every message in one batch |
| Price | Free | Free trial, then a license |
Clear answers about reading a Maildir folder in a browser, on any device, with no mail server.
Maildir is a way of storing a mailbox as a folder of small files, one file for each email. Most Linux mail servers such as Dovecot, Courier, Postfix and qmail use it. A Dovecot Maildir and a Courier Maildir are laid out the same way. There is no single mailbox file to open like an .mbox or .pst. Instead the folder holds subfolders named new, cur and tmp. Inside them each message is a plain-text file written to the RFC 5322 mail standard.
Open this page, press Choose Maildir folder and pick the top Maildir folder. Every message inside shows up in a list, and clicking one shows the mail with its pictures and attachments. Nothing is installed and no Dovecot or Courier server has to run. The page reads the files straight from your disk.
No. The page in front of you is the entire program. It reads the message files out of your folder and shows them on screen, and a server is never part of it. Want to check? Switch off your internet and the page keeps working anyway.
A Maildir splits mail across three subfolders. New mail arrives in new. Once a mail program has looked at a message it moves to cur, where the read and replied flags are kept in the file name. The tmp folder is a scratch area the server uses while a message is being written. The viewer reads all three, so nothing is missed.
A Maildir names each message with a unique string like 1699890411.M8P2.host,S=2048,W=2080:2,S rather than a .eml ending. The parts after the commas hold the size and the read flags, not a file type. Windows and Mac see files with no extension and offer nothing to open them. This viewer knows the format, so it reads them straight away.
They are the IMAP flags a mail server keeps in the file name after :2,. S means the message was seen, R that it was replied to, F that it is flagged, D that it is a draft and T that it is marked for the trash. The viewer reads these and can sort by them, so a message stays seen or flagged the way the server left it.
Yes. Maildir++ stores other mailboxes as dot-folders next to the inbox, so Sent mail sits in .Sent, deleted mail in .Trash and so on. Point the viewer at the top Maildir folder and it walks every dot-folder and lists the mail from each, keeping the folders apart in the list on the left.
A Maildir shows up in a handful of ways: pulled off a Linux mail server running Dovecot, Courier, Postfix or qmail; sitting in the mail folder of a cPanel or Plesk account backup; taken from a leaver's mailbox or a closed account; or handed over for a legal review or eDiscovery matter. Since a Maildir preserves each message and its headers untouched, digital forensics and cyber crime teams rely on it too. Whichever route it took, this page opens the folder and lays out what sits inside.
Copy the Maildir folder to the PC, open this page in Edge or Chrome and press Choose Maildir folder. The browser asks once for the folder, then every message shows up in a list. No Outlook and no mail server are needed, and the mail never leaves the machine.
Yes. On a Mac open this page in Safari or Chrome and choose the folder. On an iPhone, iPad or Android phone, put the Maildir into a .zip first, save it into Files or Downloads, then open the .zip here. The mail opens in the same tab and every attachment can be saved to the device.
Yes. Any picture the sender put in the body shows where they put it. Every attached file appears as a button beneath the subject, and again on the Attachments tab, with its size and a Save button. Each one is rebuilt from its base64 form on your own device under its real name, and the Download menu can drop the whole set into a single zip.
The tool follows the character set each part of the message declares: UTF-8, the ISO and Windows code pages, the two Japanese sets ISO-2022-JP and Shift_JIS, the Chinese trio GB2312, GBK and Big5, then Korean EUC-KR and Cyrillic KOI8-R. Hebrew, Arabic and Thai are covered too. The old UTF-7 mail reads as well. Coded subject lines and file names come out as normal text as well. Where a message claims a charset it does not really use, the tool makes its best guess rather than fill the screen with question marks.
A Maildir with tens of thousands of messages is not a problem. Each row of the list is built from that one file's headers, and the body is read only the moment you click it. An attachment loads solely when you view it or save it. So the memory in use tracks the one message on screen, never the whole folder at once.
A message file is only text, so opening one runs nothing by itself. The danger in email lives in the content: a phishing link in the body, or a harmful attachment such as a program or an Office file with hidden auto-run code. The viewer lowers that danger. Scripts are pulled out of the message, remote and tracking pictures stay blocked until you allow them, and attachments are only ever saved, never launched. Mail from a source you trust, say your own server backup or a legal record, is fine to open. For a sender you have never heard of, be careful with the links and attachments and scan anything you save with antivirus first.
Both hold a mailbox, but in opposite ways. A Maildir keeps every email as its own small file across the new, cur and tmp folders. An mbox packs a whole mailbox into one long file, one message after another. If you dropped a single mbox file here by mistake, the viewer spots it, splits it and points you to the Online MBOX Viewer. For Maildir, this page is the right one.
No, and it does not need to. Files such as maildirsize, dovecot-uidlist and dovecot.index are the server's own housekeeping, not mail. The viewer skips them and any other file with no mail headers, and it says how many it skipped in the Log tab. Only the real messages show in the list.
Yes. After the page has loaded you can drop the connection and keep on reading. Nothing reaches out to a server, and remote pictures stay blocked until you press the button, so not one network call leaves your device.
For a single message, open it and pick your browser's Print command, then set the printer to Save as PDF. You get a PDF of exactly what is on screen. The viewer also saves single HTML and text copies and pulls out attachments. To turn a whole Maildir into PDF, PST, MBOX and other file types in one batch, use the Univik Maildir Converter.
Free and private, and there is nothing to set up. Your Maildir folder never leaves your device.
Choose Maildir folder