csv-from-mbox

Turn an .mbox export into a CSV you can actually open in a spreadsheet.

You know the drill: Google Takeout hands you a two-gigabyte All mail Including Spam and Trash.mbox, and every tool that can open it wants to be an email client about it. This one does not. One Python file, standard library only, two modes, done.

What it does

Messages mode (default): one row per email.

Bodies prefer text/plain, HTML-only emails get their tags stripped, attachments are ignored, encoded headers (=?utf-8?q?Pok=C3=A9mon?=) are decoded, and dates come out ISO 8601 so your spreadsheet sorts them properly.

Addresses mode (--addresses): the original party trick. Every unique sender address, lowercased, deduplicated and sorted, with automated senders (noreply, no-reply, do-not-reply, do_not_reply, donotreply) filtered out. Great for finding out who actually writes to you.

Install

Run it straight from GitHub with uv or pipx:

uvx --from git+https://github.com/vsevolod-mineev/csv-from-mbox csv-from-mbox mail.mbox
pipx run --spec git+https://github.com/vsevolod-mineev/csv-from-mbox csv-from-mbox mail.mbox

Or clone it and run the file, there are no dependencies to install:

python3 csv_from_mbox.py mail.mbox

pip install csv-from-mbox also exists, but PyPI currently carries the 2021-era 0.4.5; use the GitHub version until 0.5.0 lands there.

Use

csv-from-mbox mail.mbox                # messages.csv with everything
csv-from-mbox mail.mbox --no-body      # metadata only, much smaller file
csv-from-mbox mail.mbox --addresses    # emails.csv with unique senders
csv-from-mbox mail.mbox -o ~/Desktop   # choose where it goes
csv-from-mbox                          # no arguments? it will ask nicely

Test

python3 -m unittest discover tests

Requirements

Python 3.9 or newer. Nothing else. That is the whole point.

License

MIT.