mbox to a searchable archive
An .mbox is every message in one enormous text file, and almost nothing opens it without importing it into a mail client first. Upload it here and get a single searchable web page, a PDF, or JSON. Threads are put back together, quoted replies are folded, and attachments are listed on the message they came with.
Your export
A WhatsApp export (.zip or _chat.txt), an .mbox, or a Slack export .zip.
Where .mbox files come from
- Gmail: Google Takeout, Mail. You get one .mbox per label.
- Thunderbird: the profile folder, or the ImportExportTools add-on.
- Apple Mail: Mailbox → Export Mailbox, which writes an .mbox inside an .mbox folder.
- Leaving a job or an ISP: most export tools produce mbox because it is the only format everything reads.
What the archive gives you
- Search that runs in the page itself, offline, with no server behind it.
- Dates, senders and recipients exactly as the headers had them, decoded from whatever character set they used.
- A body line beginning
Fromstays part of its message instead of splitting it in two, which is the classic way mbox parsers mangle a mailbox.
Large mailboxes
The message count is shown before you pay, so a Takeout file that turned out to be the wrong label costs nothing to find out about. Your upload is deleted as soon as the archive is delivered, and within 24 hours if you never pay.
How this compares
$6 for the export you are converting, whether it is fifty messages or five years of them — priced per archive, not per page or per message, with nothing recurring and no account required.
- ChatToPDF — $7 / $14 / $29 / $49 / $99 per conversion, by message count
- WaChat2PDF — free for the latest 300 messages, then single-chat or lifetime unlock
- Legacy desktop suites — $30–40/year
Taken from their own pages on 2026-09-08.
What is genuinely different here
No account is required. Your export is deleted as soon as the archive is delivered, and within 24 hours if you never pay. An account is offered after your archive arrives; declining it changes nothing about the job you paid for. The desktop alternatives take a different route to the same privacy: they never upload anything, but they want a cable, a full-device backup and an install, at $30–40/year. Seeing the message count before paying is the floor for this category rather than a reason to pick us — the difference is that the count does not change the price.
Where they do more
ChatToPDF transcribes voice notes and this does not. Their $49 tier turns the audio in a WhatsApp export into text inside the document. Voice notes here are listed as attachments, not transcribed.