Thursday, October 20, 2022

Apple Mail’s First Importers

Chris Hynes:

It turns out that Eudora and Netscape were the only major clients that used mbox format, BUT they had their own variations[…]

[…]

And speaking of reverse engineering, there were two very popular clients that didn’t use the mbox file format at all: Microsoft Outlook and Claris Emailer. Even though we had the source code for Claris Emailer, it was still quite a daunting task, with only a few weeks to complete it.

[…]

From the outside, it can sometimes feel like Apple is a chaotic mess. How could they have two importers that overlap each other? And the built-in one they are telling you not to use. Go download these Applescripts instead. It’s laughable to look back on that now.

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Old Unix Geek

Hmm... mbox predates that. It's a Unix standard.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox

Still interesting, thanks!

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