Open mbox File?

Solution 1:

The first line of the mail is the “envelope From line”. It begins with the 5 characters From␣ where ␣ is a space character. This is normal.

From Christian xxx <cg@xxx> Mon May  15 20:22:35 2010

What is unusual is that the email address is between <…>. This is unusual. I don't know if it's against the RFCs or not, but I can see Mutt chokes on it.

You should get a valid mailbox (as in, one that Mutt can parse) by processing the mailbox file through the formail command from procmail .

formail -ds sed '1 s/^From .* <\(.*\)>/From \1/' <sent.mbox >sent-reformatted.mbox
mutt -f sent-reformatted.mbox

Solution 2:

Any text editor is capable of opening .mbox. Besides text editors Mozilla Thunderbird can open them too.

Solution 3:

After a bit of nightmare on Windows with Firefox, where the .mbox gets open but only the first message is available, I found that Evolution works well: I created a new folder and then from File\Import... (I'm from Italy, the menu it's actually Importa...) I was able to read that old messages...

Solution 4:

In thunderbird you can open the file by placing it in thunderbirds local profile folder, under $HOME/.thunderbird/<profilename>.default/Mail/Local Folders/ An .mbox file there will be picked up by Thunderbird and displayed. See also the detailed instructions linked by prashanth in a different comment.