No. PFC Viewer is designed to open the cabinet file read-only,
load the contents into memory, and immediately close the file. Which
doesn't mean that something bad couldn't happen. I don't mean to sound
like a doomsayer, but computers have been known to crash from time to
time with unpredictable results, and people have been known to choose
an export file name identical to the original cabinet file name. So
it is still best practice to copy your cabinet file to another separate
directory, and work with the copy.
You can import it into a variety of other mail clients - Eudora,
Netscape, Outlook Express, and Thunderbird to name a few - on a variety of
platforms. You can also open an mbox file in a plain text editor.
This is as close to a universal mail file format as I could find. It is
a very simple one to develop for, so it made my life much easier. The
format for mail messages is described in
RFC 822.
More information about the mbox file format can be found
here.
Use the Export Mail to Mbox+Toc function to generate a set of
mailbox files that can be imported into Outlook Express 5. To import
the messages into OE, select the File Import Messages menu item. When
prompted by the import wizard, choose the Eudora Pro or Light program,
browse to the directory where you exported your emails, and select the
mailbox file to import. With luck, the process should work smoothly.
You can only view AOL 5 Address Book entries; no export function
is available at this time. Note that starting with AOL 6, address book
entries are stored in a separate set of files with the extensions .ab*.
Starting with AOL 7, address book entries are encoded using an undetermined
method. I have not embarked on the task of reading these files, decoding
their entries, and combining them into the display, and I'm not sure if
or when I ever will.
While suggestions are welcome, writing to me for assistance will
prove to be unreliable. Don't take it personally; it's a sign of the
times. I am only one man, and it's unlikely I'll be able to respond to
every request that comes my way. In addition, I may confuse your email
with the endless rivers of spam that collects in my Inbox, and delete it.
Instead, try writing to one of the newsgroups about AOL, like
alt.aol.tricks or
alt.online-service.america-online.
I look there from time to time, so you might even get a response from
your friendly, neighborhood software developer. If I'm in the mood.
The PFC Viewer was developed using the Sun
Java 2 Software Development Kit (J2SDK) v1.5.0. To create the Java
Swing user interface, I used the NetBeans
v5.0 IDE - this is the open-source variant of the old Sun Forte for Java IDE
(now known as Sun ONE Studio). Apache Ant
1.6.2 was used to build the project. The development work was done under
Linux, while final testing was done under Windows.
Yes. The source code for PFC Viewer is distributed under the terms
of the MIT
license. The license text is included with the source files.
The archive file containing the source code for the current version is
pfcview-0.4-src.jar.
The brief version history of the PFC Viewer application is listed
below.
0.4
30 Dec 2006
Fixes array index bug while reading AOL 9 Filing Cabinet.
0.3
16 Mar 2006
Specifies Main-Class attribute in jar manifest for easier startup.
Displays toolbar buttons for some menu items.
Displays main window using system look-and-feel.
0.2
29 Mar 2003
Exports emails to mbox + toc files, enabling import into Outlook Express.
Displays v5 address book entries.
Allows email text to be copied to clipboard.
Remembers last export directory.
Fixes bug that caused cabinet index entries to be skipped.
Console program outputs message if argument is not a valid cabinet file.
