Copy messages from a Thunderbird mbox file to a MySQL table using php

Written by: Maciej Grajcarek

July 1, 2008

If for some reason you would like to copy your messages from Thunderbird to a MySQL database, here you can find a simple PHP script which will do it for you! All you have to do is to set some variables in the php class and create a proper database table. Let’s start with the class.

var $file_name = 'some_mbox_file';
var $file_path = '/path/to/file/';

var $db_user = 'user';
var $db_password = 'pass';
var $db_host = 'localhost';
var $db_name = 'mbox';

$file_name is the name of the thunderbird mbox file and $file_path points to the folder it is located (deafult path in Windows looks sth like this: C:\\Documents and Settings\\%user%\\Application Data\\Thunderbird\\Profiles).
You should also define the database connection variables.

Next thing is to create a database table:

CREATE TABLE  `messages` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`from` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`to` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`subject` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`date` varchar(255) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`message` text collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
`received_ip` varchar(15) collate latin1_general_ci NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=1 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 COLLATE=latin1_general_ci;

As you can see, this script will read: from, to, subject, date, received_ip and message fields for each of messages. It will not copy attachments!

It supports also processing of big files. We have used it to parse files bigger than 3GB.

Posted in php