MBox Streamer

A streaming, event-emitting mbox file parser. Give it a stream (or a path-like pointer to an mbox file) — it will happily read through, firing off a 'message' event with a ParsedMail payload for each one it encounters.

Installation

npm i eaton/mbox-streamer

Usage

import { MboxStreamer } from "./streamer.js";

const mbs = new MboxStreamer();
mbs.on('message', message => {
  console.log(`${message.date?.toISOString()}: ${message.subject}`);
});

await mbs.parse("./my-email-backup.mbox");

See the mailparser project for details on the ParsedMail object that's generated.

The mbox-to-json project served as this one's original inspiration; rather than accumulating parsed messages and returning them at the end of the operation, however, we emit each one and let the listeners figure out what to keep or discard.

TODOs

• Allow parsing options to be passed into the parse() function; the mailparser project has a few nice convenience flags that can speed up the work if (for example) you don't care about grabbing HTML versions of email bodies or extracting file attachments.
• Add a pure Transformer version for folks comfortable piping streams rather than using a wrapper class.