Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections
Sustainability of Digital Formats: Planning for Library of Congress Collections |
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| Introduction | Sustainability Factors | Content Categories | Format Descriptions | Contact | |
| Full name | MBOXRD Email Format |
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| Description |
MBOXRD 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. MBOXRD was designed to solve the message corruption problems inherent in the MBOXO format. It employs "reversible From quoting" because it allows for differentiating between ">From " found in the original message from ">From " found in a transformed MBOXO file. This is important because lines that begin with ">From " act as the separator lines between email messages; if ">From " appears in any line in original text outside of the start of a new message, it will become a misplaced separator line and incorrectly mark a new message when indeed, there is no new message. In MBOXRD files, any line of the message, in either the header or the body, that begins with zero or more '>' characters followed by the five characters 'F', 'r', 'o', 'm', and ' ', has a single greater-than sign (">") character prepended to it. When a message is read from a MBOXRD mailbox file, it is transformed back so that any line of the message, in either the header or the body, that begins with one or more '>' characters followed by the five characters 'F', 'r', 'o', 'm', and ' ', has the single leading '>' character removed from it. Because "From " at the start of a line is more probable than ">From " in real-world messages, an MBOXRD reader will restore a greater number of messages written to a mailbox by an MBOXO tool to their original forms than an MBOXRD tool, but will not and cannot restore all messages. |
| 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 | The Mozilla family of MUAs including Thunderbird, Mozilla Suite, Netscape, Portable Thunderbird, Postbox, Spicebird, SeaMonkey as well as the open source version of Eudora use a slightly modified version of the MBOXRD variant with more complicated "From " line quoting rules. 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 details on compatibility issues. |
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| History |
MBOXRD format originated in 1995 and is named after Rahul Dhesi (hence the RD) although several people were working on the same issues during this time, Tim Goodwin being one. qmail switched (link through Internet Archive) from MBOXO to MBOXRD on 1996-03-02. |
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