Access mail.app's POP mail boxes from OS 9

Aug 03, '01 04:02:50PM

Contributed by: robg

If you're ever booted in OS 9 (as I was earlier) and have a need for something that's in your OS X mailbox (which I did), I found that that it's fairly easy to find that something from OS 9.

Apple's mail.app stores your mail in ~/Library/Mail. Inside that folder are a series of directories for each email account you have enabled, along with a folder called Mailboxes. Inside of Mailboxes, you'll see Deleted Messages.mbox and Inbox.mbox. These are both plain-text files which can be opened and searched by almost any text processing application; I used Alpha in OS 9. I was able to find the data I was looking for, and then closed the file (without saving any changes, of course!). Later, when I rebooted into OS X, I found that (as expected) the mailbox files still work normally in mail.app.

I believe this only works for POP-style mailboxes where the mail is stored locally; I don't think it can be used to view your mac.com IMAP mailbox, for example.

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