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Montanan · Sep 7, 2004, 12:07 PM

So I'm a happy user of the OS X Mail app these days, but I was an AOL user before that ... and so I've still got thousands of old e-mail messages stored in AOL's proprietary "Personal Filing Cabinets." (Some of these mails are in the OS X version of AOL, while others are in the Windows version.)

Most of those old e-mails are work-related, and I still need to refer to them every now and then ... so at the moment it means that I need to crank up the AOL software to view those e-mails. I would *love* to find a way to extract my e-mails from the AOL filing cabinet ... ideally so that they could be imported into the OS X Mail app, but if that's not possible then any other non-AOL format would be great.

Any suggestions on techniques or software to extract either my old Win or Mac AOL e-mails would be greatly appreciated! Many thanks ...

cpac · Sep 7, 2004, 02:57 PM

there are no "export" or "save as" options in AOL itself?

Montanan · Sep 7, 2004, 04:03 PM

Originally posted by cpac:
there are no "export" or "save as" options in AOL itself?

Nope ... just the ability to save individual e-mails as text files, or in AOL's proprietary format. Stupid, stupid software ... grrr!

I suppose if I had a few days to kill I could export all 4000 e-mails individually, pull the resulting files into a database, and write some sort of a script or macro to categorize at least some of the header information. But that just sounds waaaaaaay too painful for the value received.

New York, eh? Didn't you used to live in Salt Lake?

cpac · Sep 7, 2004, 04:10 PM

yep - grew up in Salt Lake, was away for a while, came back for law school, and now I've graduated, and will be starting work here in the city on Monday.

Anwyay - you might see if you can do a "redirect" of at least those emails you received to your new non-AOL address and see if that helps.

Ultimately you could also try to forward at the mail (and yes, that changes who it's from etc.) but as long as you use the option to search everywhere, you ought to still be able to find whatever you happen to be looking for.

Montanan · Sep 7, 2004, 04:41 PM

Yow ... that's quite a culture shock scenario! Hope you and the Big Apple prove to be a good fit for each other. (I lived in SLC for a while, as well ... my undergraduate degree is from Westminster College, of all places.)

Anyhow ... many thanks for the idea. Unfortunately, AOL won't even let me forward the saved mail, since their system will only forward mail that is still resident on their server. I'd have to paste each old message individually into anew mail message and send that off. Aarugh!!

cpac · Sep 7, 2004, 04:58 PM

Originally posted by Montanan:
Yow ... that's quite a culture shock scenario! Hope you and the Big Apple prove to be a good fit for each other.

Probably was back in the beginning, but before returning to law school I lived in the city for two years, so in many ways It feels like returning home.

Anyway - damn that AOL.

I didn't find anything on version tracker for OS X, but since you have some of the mail on windows anyway, you might want to see if there's some utility from the dark side that'll help convert your mail....

Chuckit · Sep 8, 2004, 03:06 AM

I recently tried to do this. I couldn't find anything. There seems to be a total lack of interest in reading the filing cabinet format. I've thought about taking a crack at it, but I don't have time right now to fuss around with AOL's easily corruptible file formats. At any rate, I think you're stuck with AOL unless you find some way to AppleScript it.

gperks · Sep 8, 2004, 10:53 AM

A couple of years ago I found a PC program that was supposed to split open the AOL, I think it was AOL v3, PFC files. It kinda worked - you could read the email but IIRC all the emails were pasted together in one line, replies were missing etc.

Amazing nobody has gone for this. It would be nice if AOL would make available a document of the file format - have you tried asking them? With documentation a program to extract the emails wouldn't be too far behind.

Montanan · Sep 8, 2004, 10:32 PM

Well, I've found a couple of programs and services out there that supposedly extract data from the *Windows* versions of AOL's Personal Filing Cabinet ... but none of them claim to support the Mac. It's maddening ... especially since it's hard to believe that AOL's Mac e-mail format is all that much different from the Windows one.

Regardless, AOL is evil, evil, evil.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they deliberately keep their system as proprietary and arcane as possible, just to make it more difficult for their customers to leave.

CharlesS · Sep 8, 2004, 11:04 PM

Originally posted by Montanan:
Well, I've found a couple of programs and services out there that supposedly extract data from the *Windows* versions of AOL's Personal Filing Cabinet ... but none of them claim to support the Mac. It's maddening ... especially since it's hard to believe that AOL's Mac e-mail format is all that much different from the Windows one.

Are the formats different? Do we know? If not, it's worth a try, at least...

Montanan · Sep 9, 2004, 08:34 AM

Well, since I have an AOL/Windows mailbox to salvage, as well, I've decided to try one of the products designed to do that: ePreserver. I'll report back if I have any luck getting the software to recognize or convert my AOL/Mac filing cabinet.

, again!