Mac Mail 2.x Conversion – .emlx to mbox

Today I was doing some research in order to write a Ruby backup script for email housed in the Mail app on my Mac. On my Internet travels the popular wisdom had it that the proprietary .emlx format used in Apple Mail 2.x was not saying it in the backup department (or any department for that matter).

Basically, no other mail program uses that format and apparently, Mail itself cannot import it. Oops! Apple why are you using this format again? Ah yes, Spotlight, ummm, I am yet to be convinced.

All roads lead to mbox as a more backup friendly format, so I needed to find or write a conversion routine. Well, this blog isn’t called ‘Ruby On The Shoulders Of Giants’ for nothing; so I opted for the find.

Ordinary Google searches brought me close, but no cigar. So to plan B, the RubyTalk mailing list. I cannot praise this list highly enough. It has a reasonable volume of traffic and is very helpful. Enquiries are dealt with courteously and pretty damn quickly.

I fired off my question and sure enough, Dale replied with a link gleaned from Google Code Search. Fabulous! A Ruby routine to do the conversion from .emlx to mbox thanks to the industry of the guys at vengefulcow.com.