MBOX archives for schools and organizations: the edition you buy in Apple School Manager

Every so often a message arrives from an IT department, and it is always a version of the same question: we need Mbox Viewer on forty Macs — how do we buy forty licences?

For a while the honest answer was an awkward one. You couldn’t. Not properly, anyway.

What Apple School Manager can and cannot buy

Apple School Manager and Apple Business Manager are good at buying apps. You pick an app, you buy however many copies you need, you assign them to people or to devices through your MDM, and when someone leaves you take the licence back and give it to the next person.

What neither of them buys is an in-app purchase. And in the Mac App Store, that is exactly how Mbox Viewer Pro unlocks: the app is free to open a mailbox, and a one-time purchase inside it removes the size limit.

So the licence a school actually needed was the one thing the school could not buy. The workaround — asking forty people to each make a personal purchase and then send the receipt to accounting — is not a workaround, it is a small administrative disaster. In a district where everyone signs in with a Managed Apple ID, most of those people cannot buy anything at all.

A Custom App is Apple’s answer to precisely this

Apple has a mechanism for the case where an organization needs a build that isn’t quite the public one: the Custom App. It is a separate, private version of the app, distributed only to the organizations you name, with no listing in the App Store that anyone can stumble onto.

Mbox Viewer Pro for Education is that build. Same app, same code, same read-only behaviour — with every Pro feature already unlocked, permanently, and no in-app purchase anywhere in it. It is bought by the seat inside Apple School Manager or Apple Business Manager and pushed out by MDM like any other app: Jamf, Intune, Mosyle, Kandji, Addigy, whatever you already run.

The name says Education because that is the store’s category, but Apple Business Manager works the same way. A law firm and a city council buy it through exactly the same door as a university.

What the person in front of the Mac sees

Nothing. That is the whole point.

They open the app and it works. There is no purchase screen to explain in a manual, no licence key to distribute over email, no account to sign into, no size ceiling to run into halfway through a job, and nothing that expires next year. IT support never gets the ticket, because there is no step where the ticket comes from.

What organizations use it for

We don’t publish who uses it. That is deliberate, and it will stay that way: a Custom App is private, and the list of organizations it goes to is theirs to talk about, not ours.

What we can say is what the work looks like, because it repeats:

• Records requests and legal holds. A Google Vault or Google Takeout export arrives, someone has to review it, narrow it down to the messages the request actually covers, and hand over those and nothing else. Since 2.8.4 the app exports a selection as a brand-new MBOX file — the original archive is never modified, and everything you excluded is simply not in the new file.
• Mailboxes of people who have left. A former employee’s or student’s account is gone, the exported mailbox is all that remains, and someone still has to open it.
• Historical archives. Backups and mail-server copies from a decade ago that no current client will touch.

One more thing that tends to settle the decision in a school: the app has no server, no analytics and no cloud. It works with the network off. Nothing about the mail being read leaves the Mac.

The price

39.99 USD per seat, paid once. That is below the 44.99 USD lifetime licence in the App Store — bought in volume, each seat costs less than it does retail, which is the way round it should be.

That figure is the United States price. Apple converts every other territory from it automatically, so an organization in the euro area sees 44.99 €, and a Canadian one its own equivalent. The amount that counts is the one Apple School or Business Manager shows you.

No subscription, no renewal, no expiry date. Buy more seats whenever you need them, without writing to us again.

Why there is no buy button

Because there is nothing to press yet. A Custom App only becomes visible to an organization after its Organization ID has been added to the app’s record — until then it isn’t hidden from you so much as it doesn’t exist for you.

So the first step is not a payment. It is an email telling us who you are, so your ID goes on the list. Once it is there, the app shows up in your account under Apps and Books → Custom Apps — Apple allows up to 24 hours for that — and you buy the seats yourself with your usual payment method.

It is also why you won’t find an App Store link for this edition anywhere on our site. There is no public listing to link to, and pointing you at the regular app would be pointing you at the thing that doesn’t solve your problem.

How to ask for it

Four things get it moving: your organization’s name, its Apple School or Business Manager Organization ID (in Settings → Enrollment Information), roughly how many seats you need, and someone to reply to.

The form and the full details are on the Education page. If your organization runs neither Apple School Manager nor Apple Business Manager, write anyway — that is a conversation, not a dead end.

And if this is for a single Mac rather than an organization, none of the above applies to you: the regular app is the same program, free to try, with a one-time purchase to lift the size limit.