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Chris Digital Tools

Mbox Archive Reader

Browse, organise, and export emails from a Gmail Takeout file

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This tool needs Chrome, Edge, Opera, or Brave

Reading a large mbox file straight off your disk relies on a browser feature called the File System Access API. It is only built into Chromium based browsers.

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How to use this tool

1. Export your mailbox from Google Takeout as an mbox file
4. Filter and search to find the emails you want
2. Click "Choose Mbox File" and select it
5. Tick the ones to keep, or select all visible
3. Wait while it reads, large files take a little time
6. Click "Export Selected" to download a single zip

How this actually works

This tool does not add anything to the web. It does not upload your file, it does not send your emails anywhere, and there is no database sitting behind it. The mbox file you choose is read directly off your own computer, processed entirely inside your browser, and the zip it builds is written straight back to your downloads folder. Close the tab and nothing of yours remains anywhere except on your own machine.

This is another small tool built because I needed it myself. I had a mailbox to sort through and no appetite for installing a full mail client just to pull a handful of emails out as PDFs, so I built this instead. It stayed online afterwards in case it is useful to someone else with the same problem.

Do not take my word for it, prove it yourself

There is no temp file to point at, because your data is never written to disk as a working file. It is read into memory, processed, and the only thing ever saved is the zip you asked for. Here are two checks you can run right now, on your own screen, without trusting me.

1

Pull your internet, then use the tool anyway

Switch off your wifi, or unplug your network cable, then load a file and export it. Everything still works, because nothing is ever sent anywhere. This badge shows your live connection state:

Checking connection, please wait
2

Watch the network counter stay at zero

The moment you choose a file, this starts counting every network request the page makes while it reads and exports your emails. It stays at zero, because your data never leaves this machine.

Waiting for you to choose a file
1. Choose your mbox file

Select the .mbox file from your Gmail Takeout export. Large files, up to around 2GB, are read in chunks directly from your disk.