node-mbox

mbox file parser for Node.js.

Backward incompatibility warning

From version 1.0.0 onwards, message data is passed around as Buffer instead of String.

You can call msg.toString([encoding]) to convert to a string, or explicitly set the encoding option (see below).

Install

From the NPM repository:

$ npm install node-mbox

From the Github repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/robertklep/node-mbox.git
$ cd node-mbox
$ npm install [-g]

Description

This module parses mbox files, as described here. Starting with version 0.1.0, it's pretty speedy, processing a 1.5GB mbox file in about 20 seconds.

Note that this module doesn't parse the mail messages themselves, for which other solutions exist (for example the quite able mailparser module from Andris Reinman).

Example

See the included example.js:

$ npm install mailparser
$ node example < test/test-4-message.mbox

Options

• encoding : output encoding (default: undefined, meaning message data is passed as Buffer)
• strict : enable strict mode (emits an error when input doesn't look like valid mbox data)
• stream: instead of collecting and emitting entire messages, emit a stream. This is useful if you want to process mailboxes that contain large messages (the aforementioned mailparser accepts message streams directly)

Usage

const Mbox = require('node-mbox');

// First, different types of instantiation:

// 1. pass it a filename
const mbox    = new Mbox('filename', { /* options */ });

// 2. pass it a string/buffer
const fs      = require('fs');
const mailbox = fs.readFileSync('filename');
const mbox    = new Mbox(mailbox, { /* options */ });

// 3. pass it a stream
const fs      = require('fs');
const stream  = fs.createReadStream('filename');
const mbox    = new Mbox(stream, { /* options */ });

// 4. pipe a stream to it
const mbox    = new Mbox({ /* options */ });
process.stdin.pipe(mbox);

// Next, catch events generated:
mbox.on('message', function(msg) {
  // `msg` is a `Buffer` instance
  console.log('got a message', msg.toString());
});

mbox.on('error', function(err) {
  console.log('got an error', err);
});

mbox.on('end', function() {
  console.log('done reading mbox file');
});

Streaming example:

const mbox = new Mbox({ stream : true });

// `message` event emits stream
mbox.on('message', function(stream) {
  stream.on('data', function(chunk) {
    ...
  }).on('end', function() {
    ...
  });
});

process.stdin.pipe(mbox);

Testing

There is a limited number of tests:

$ cd /path/to/node-mbox/
$ npm test

License

MIT