Family archive situation: my late father's correspondence sits in Outlook Express DBX files rescued from his old PC. Our household is entirely Mac now.
What is the path from DBX into Apple Mail where we can read and keep everything?
Outlook Express DBX files to Mac Mail
Solved Email & Outlook
BA
Barry Allen September 9, 2016
2 replies
3,540 views
Reviewed by moderators
A worthwhile archive to preserve properly. The path runs through mbox, the format Apple Mail imports natively. The conversion happens once on any Windows machine or VM you can borrow.
1
Convert the DBX set to mbox with a converter on a Windows machine, SysTools DBX Converter offers mbox output directly, producing one mbox file per DBX mailbox. Include Folders.dbx in the input folder, it helps the converter reconstruct names.
2
Copy the mbox files to the Mac, they are plain files and travel over anything, USB stick or cloud drive.
3
In Apple Mail: File, Import Mailboxes, select Files in mbox format, choose the files and import.
4
Everything lands under an Import mailbox in the sidebar. Drag folders under On My Mac, rename to taste and the archive is a permanent local mailbox, searchable through Spotlight like the rest of Mail.
If borrowing a Windows machine is genuinely impossible, an alternative exists in the EML direction: some Mac tools read DBX directly but they are scarcer and less maintained, so the Windows conversion pass remains the dependable route. Once imported, consider one more step for a family archive: select the imported mailboxes and export them via Mail's own Mailbox, Export Mailbox to a backup location, giving you clean mbox copies of the preserved state independent of any one Mac.
Converted on a work laptop and imported this evening, twelve years of his letters readable again on the family iMac. The export backup is done too. Thank you, genuinely.