Last Week macOSXHints ran a tip about using Mail.app’s “Save As…” option 
to export messages in mbox format.
Mark Pilgrim, who recently switched from OS X to Linux, takes the opportunity to point out that this option doesn’t create a valid mbox. Rather, it is another example of Apple’s wicked addiction to proprietary file formats.
Mail.app was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Mark. It made him switch away. And the pain is still raw:
However, in the interests of fairness, I will amend my previous statement that Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with no possibility of exporting it to an open format. This is not true. Mail.app is a roach motel that auto-upgraded 14 years of my mail into a proprietary, undocumented format with a tantalizingly broken export feature. I apologize for the confusion.
Mail.app. Gone but not easily forgotten.
Fortunately developers have found solutions and work-arounds for exporting Mail 2.0 messages. Mark could use either emlx to mbox converter or, better, the Archive script in Andreas Amann’s excellent Mail Scripts to solve his problem.
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Tags: Apple Mail, emlx, exporting, mail.app, mbox, pilgrim, switching
I’m sympathetic to the proprietary file format lock-in concerns but I’m not buying Mark Pilgrim’s complaint about Mail.app. I can switch between Mail.app and virtually any other program on any platform *because I use IMAP*! Mark needs to store his email on the server in IMAP folders. Then he can access his data of 14 years from any (connected) computer, anywhere, anytime. And chances are the server has more recent backups than his local machine.
Okay, so some services don’t have IMAP, only POP. Well, IMO, they are broken– find an email host that supports IMAP, there are plenty.
You know, I think I liked it better when Mark Pilgrim gave up on blogging.
He lost all his user-generated metadata because he didn’t have backups and now he claims Mail doesn’t grok mbox files (he could be right — I haven’t tested it — but his track record suggests betting against him would be safer). And there are aftermarket tools to make his dreams come true (and I would have thought a guy who can write an RSS feed validator could hack something together).Â
For a guy who claims to be as smart a user as he does, these seem like pretty lame gripes. He’s been around the Mac and computers in general a long time, after all.Â
Not to mention the fact that you can fix the resulting broken mbox file with a one-line script.
This is not worth whining about.
Just to be sure I wasn’t as big a whiner as Pilgrim, IÂ
* Â saved a mailbox’s contents (select all-> save as -> Raw Message Format),
* Â downloaded Thunderbird
* Â Â dropped the file I created (it looked like an mbox to me but I figured I’d see if the importer saw it that way) in Thunderbird’s Local Folders directory
*   and hey presto. It was all there.Â
I’m more convinced than ever that this whole ‘OS X sux! Linux roXXors!1!’ is just a way to gin up some traffic and rile up the fanboys.Â
Move on, nothing more to see here.Â
I think that the important thing is keeping stuff in open formats.
I keep all my word processing in plain text files with Unix line feeds. My digital camera pictures are kept in jpeg. My screenshot archives are in jpeg and png. My music files are encoded in Flac and MP3. All of these open just fine in Mac OS X, XP, or Linux.
Even my comic book collection database, which is kept in a sqlite database and managed from the command line, is cross platform since Sqlite is in the public domain and works on every OS that I might use.
I personally suspect that Mark switched for many reasons, and “data fidelity” was just a small part of it. Maybe, deep down, he couldn’t handel the switch to x86 processors?
Jeff suggested:
I think that’s true. As others have pointed out, the problems he has with Mail.app – for example – are hardly insurmountable. Something else is going on.
“couldn’t handel the switch to x86 processors?”
mm but he bought a new x86 to run ubuntu on… that makes even less sense than the whole data fidelity thing
Problem is that mbox isn’t a standard … it’s a family of mutually incompatible file formats that (AFAIK) never been formally defined through an RFC.
The closest to a standard for mbox (in the Unix world) is mboxrd and even Thunderbird extends and modifies it.
mbox is open but loosely (and ill-) defined, that might fit Mark’s definition of an open standard, but not mine.
Patrick is right; there is no “standard” mbox format.
So that renders his argument moot: he claimed that Mail.app in Tiger migrated away from mbox, breaking compatibility and denying his access to 14 years of email. If mbox is not a standard — more a custom than a codified format — then why was he relying on it in the first place?Â
When I read that the was no standard for the mbox format, I have to admit that I was really surprised. I would have thought it would have appeared in an RFC or the Posix standards, but obviously I am wrong.
I kind of wish that Apple had made use of Maildir when revising Mail.app for Tiger, rather than reinventing the wheel, but they probably has good reason for not doing so.
I thought there was no valid mbox format. The only real test is whether it would open in a text editor (and hopefully in your mail client)!
[...] Unlike other notable whiners, Maciej understands that while mbox is not a standard, IMAP is. Shame about the emoticons, though. [...]