PFC Viewer

PFC Viewer is a Java application I developed to view and export the contents of the AOL Filing Cabinet, also known as the Personal Filing Cabinet. I have had an AOL account for many years, and even though my primary Internet account is now with the cable company providing my high-speed access, I still keep the old account around for a variety of minor reasons. One nagging issue is the accumulation of old emails archived within my Personal Filing Cabinet. To maintain access to years of correspondence, I need to use the AOL client program because nothing else can read their proprietary file format for the cabinet. Now, with some software handiwork, I can open the cabinet file, display its contents in a window, and export the emails to a text file.

What PFC Viewer can do:

Display the folder structure in the Filing Cabinet.
Display the list of emails stored in a folder, and the content of a selected email.
Copy selected email text to the system clipboard.
Export emails in a selected folder, and its sub-folders, to a text file compatible with other email programs.
Export favorites to an HTML file.

What PFC Viewer cannot do:

Export address book entries in the Filing Cabinet.
Repair a corrupt Filing Cabinet.
Cure cancer.

PFC Viewer would not have been possible without the ground-breaking work done by another AOL user, Franz von Gordon, to analyze and document the AOL Filing Cabinet file format. His work can be found here.