mbox Reader

Reads an mbox file and creates a table with a row for each single message within the file.

The parser is based on Apache James Mime4J. Technical specification of the mbox format can be found in: RFC4155: The application/mbox Media Type and mbox manpage.

The result is provided as binary objects (BLOB), which can be further processed by the “mbox Message Extractor” and “mbox Header Extractor” nodes.

Options

mbox file: The mbox file to parse (attention: when you’re running on a Mac and processing .mbox data exported with Mail.app, note that the .mbox “file” is actually a directory (aka. “package”). So, make sure not to select the directory, but to navigate into the directory and there select the file called “mbox”). Pro tip: You can drag and drop .mbox files into your KNIME workflow, and a new node will be added for reading the dropped file.
Encoding: File encoding
From Line Pattern: The regular expression to use for parsing From headers. The first option ^From \\S+@\\S.*\\d{4}$ is more strict and will only match “From” lines which contain an @ character. The second option ^From \\S+.*\\d{4}$ will also match “From” lines without @ – use this e.g. if you need to parse Thunderbird mbox content.
Max. message size: Maximum (single) message size in megabytes for parsing; attention: in case this value is too small, messages will not be parsed correctly

This node has no input ports

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To use this node in KNIME, install the extension mbox Nodes from the below update site following our NodePit Product and Node Installation Guide:

v5.9

A zipped version of the software site can be downloaded here.

Plugin provider: Philipp Katz

Plugin version: 2.3.0.202309171531

On NodePit since: 2025-12-11

Last update: 2026-01-06

KNIME versions: Since v4.5

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