Mac OS Mail - Email Extractor

Mail App Emails to CSV or JSON

What it (currently) does:

Email Export from Apple's Mail App on Mac OS -> Plaintext input -> Parse/Extract -> Save to CSV or JSON

Sometimes it can be handy to get structured data from a mailbox on Mac OS (Mail). This is a quick (still) hacky script which parses a plaintext export email export from the Mail app in Mac OS and returns a structured CSV.

Features

• TXT mode: Parse manually exported emails from a txt file.
• EMXL mode: Parse emlx files created by the Mail app
• Export formats & versions per script execution
  • Export versions
    • "plain"
    • "exploded": email addresses are split in case of multiple email recipients, each row contains only one receiving address (all other fields are duplicated)
  • Formats (for each version)
    • CSV
    • JSON
• Custom Columns based on Regex-extraction:
  • Custom regex extraction schemes can be defined in config.py:

Input (text file mode)

1. Select the emails you want to parse in Mac OS Mail (hold shift in order to select multiple, CMD + A in order to select all from the current mailbox)
2. File > Save As > Select Format: Plain Text > Save to the script directory & rename to "input.txt"

Input (emlx parser mode)

Edit the config.py file with your Mac OS filepath to your Mailbox that you want to extract email data from

Run

Tested with Python 3.10.6

pip install -r requirements.txt

1. edit config.py
2. run either in txt file mode:

rename your txt file input.txt, place in script dir, then execute:
python3 extract_txt.py

or

1. run in emlx parser mode:

don't forget to edit config.py first, then execute:
python3 extract_txt.py

if you want to use a CLI with args (implementation in progress)

python3 mac-os-extract-mails.py

[Options]
-e : run emlx parser
-t : run txt file parser
-c : open config file for editing
-sinput: select input file for txt file parser
-sodir: select folder for outputs

Outputs

Output Columns

- "date_utc"
- "date_iso"
- "date"
- "from"
- "from_name"
- "from_mail"
- "subject"
- "to"
- "to_name"
- "to_mail"
- "from"
- "reply_to"
- "reply_to_name"
- "reply_to_mail"
- "body"
- "x-universally-unique-identifier"
- "message-id"
- "mime-version"
- "content-type"

Todo

• Plaintext mode
• Emlx mode
• Explode outputs: Split multiple recipient email addresses into separate data rows (1 email = 1..* rows). Currently: 1 row = 1 email, recipient email addresses are comma-separated
• Custom columns from RegEx outputs
• Export json
• Command line tool
• EMXL mode: Add caching
• EMXL mode: Add mailbox folder picker (tkinter?)
• TXT mode: Add file picker for input file (+cli path option)
• Option: Create Google Sheet from Outputs
• Option: Setting utc min-date
• Option: Ignore Signatures
• Option: Traverse all mbox'es if a mail box for mail account folder is undefined