Exporting mail

The aoxexport program retrieves messages from an Archiveopteryx database and writes them in ordinary mbox format. (The output messages are sorted roughly oldest-first.)

You can use it to extract all of a mailbox, part of a mailbox, or part of the entire database.

Here's how to extract one mailbox:

aoxexport /users/nirmala/inbox

You can add search terms in order to export a specified selection of messages. In this example, aoxexport finds and exports all messages in Nirmala's inbox that are to/from/cc/… any address at example.com:

aoxexport /users/nirmala/inbox address example.com

You can also search the entire database. This example shows how to extract absolutely all messages to/from/cc/… any address at example.com:

aoxexport address example.com

Note that aoxexport doesn't bother to economise on RAM. If you plan to export a very large amount of mail, we suggest doing it one mailbox at a time.

Here's a search to export everything flagged as junk by Thunderbird:

aoxexport flag junk

Complex searches are possible, see aox show search for the syntax.

aoxexport has two command-line options, -v (to show more logging about its work) and -q (to show less log).

In case of questions, please write to info@aox.org.

Relevant links

About this page

Last modified: 2010-05-02
Location: aox.org/aoxexport/