Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections |
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Introduction | Sustainability Factors | Content Categories | Format Descriptions | Contact |
Full name | MBOXO Email Format |
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Description |
MBOXO is one of the MBOX family of related file formats used for holding collections of electronic mail messages. See MBOX for a description of the syntax. Since all MBOX messages are concatenated into one text file, MBOXO (and MBOXRD) formatted messages locate the message start by scanning for “From ” lines. If a "From " string occurs at the beginning of a line in either the header or the body of a message, the e-mail message must be modified before the message is stored in an MBOX mailbox file or the line will be taken as the start of the new message. MBOXO files prepends one greater-than sign (“>”) to any line of the message, in either the header or the body, that begins with the five characters 'F', 'r', 'o', 'm', and ' ' (“>From ”). According to Jonathan de Boyne Pollard (link available through Internet Archive), messages appended to an MBOXO mailbox are irrevocably corrupted by prepending the “>” before the word "From" because it is impossible to determine if the “>” was already present as a character in the original message. If a line already contained ">From " at the beginning (such as in a quotation), it is unchanged when written. |
Production phase | Used for content in initial (by message authors), middle (by archives) or final state (by message recipients/other end users). |
Relationship to other formats | |
Subtype of | MBOX, MBOX Email Format |
LC experience or existing holdings | See MBOX |
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LC preference | See MBOX |
Disclosure | See MBOX |
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Documentation | See MBOX |
Adoption |
Eudora uses an mboxo variation where a sender's e-mail address is replaced by the constant string "???@???" See also MBOX |
Licensing and patents | See MBOX |
Transparency | See MBOX |
Self-documentation | See MBOX |
External dependencies | See MBOX |
Technical protection considerations | See MBOX |
Tag | Value | Note |
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Filename extension | See related format. | See MBOX |
Internet Media Type | See related format. | See MBOX |
Magic numbers | See related format. | See MBOX |
Pronom PUID | fmt/720 |
See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/PRONOM/fmt/720. Note that PRONOM does not specify variants of MBOX. |
Wikidata Title ID | Q527723 |
See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q527723. Note that Wikidata does not specify variants of MBOX. |
General |
See MBOX for compatibility issues. |
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History |
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