Mbox Viewer 2.8.6 for Mac and Windows: Gmail Labels Stop Being a Wall of Rows

2.8.6 is out on both stores: the Microsoft Store approved it on 4 September, the same day it was submitted, and Apple approved the Mac build on the 7th. Windows also got a small 2.8.7 on the 4th, which is why this post covers three release numbers at once.

The app is read-only, as always. Nothing below modifies the archive you open.

Gmail labels stop being a wall of rows

Gmail keeps the hierarchy inside the label name. Work/Clients/Acme is one label, not three, and that is exactly how it lands in your Takeout export. The sidebar used to list those paths flat, so a mailbox with a real label tree turned into a column of rows that all began with the same words and differed at the end — the part you could not see.

They now fold into a tree. Each row shows only its last segment, with the full path on hover; branches open and close, and the branch holding the label you are filtering by opens on its own.

There is one detail worth knowing, because Gmail behaves the same way. A rung that exists only as a prefix — Work/Clients/Acme exists, but no message is labelled Work/Clients — is drawn greyed out and without a count. It groups and it unfolds, but it does not filter, because there is nothing to filter by. And if none of your labels contains a slash, the sidebar looks exactly as it did before.

This one came from a customer who asked for it before buying.

Two ways to have Pro

The annual subscription is on sale again, next to Pro Lifetime. The upgrade screen shows both cards and you pick: pay once, or pay yearly. Either unlocks the same thing, and nothing changes for anyone who already bought the lifetime licence — that one is still a single payment and still does not expire.

The subscription card is only drawn when the store hands the app a real price for it, so in a market where it is not on sale you get the screen you already know. The free tier is untouched: mailboxes up to 1 GB, every feature, no time limit. Prices for both plans, market by market, are on the pricing page.

That is also what 2.8.7 for Windows is about. Settings used to tell someone paying the subscription that “Pro Lifetime” was active; now it simply says Pro is active. The licence state knows which of the two plans is behind it, and when both are present the lifetime one wins — that is the one you cannot lose. The wording is decided in a single place, so it also comes out right in the refresh that runs immediately after a purchase, not only when you reopen Settings. On the paywall, the one-time card now reads “One payment, forever” and drops the ”— no subscription” tail, which was redundant sitting right beside the subscription card.

Privacy can forget what you have opened

The search history can now be cleared from Settings → Privacy, and clearing it actually clears it. Every open window kept its own copy in memory and wrote it back on the next search, so what you had just deleted came straight back. It is a single list for the whole app now.

On the Mac there is a third button. The app stores a bookmark for each mailbox you open, so it can reach the file again after a restart — and those bookmarks are keyed by full path, which means that together they are a list of the mailboxes you have opened. That button drops all of them. Nothing breaks: the next time you open a file, its bookmark is created again. The section also states plainly now that everything it lists stays on this Mac, and that clearing it cannot be undone.

Worth saying, since this is the privacy section: the search indexes live in memory and there is no recent-files list, so the history was the only thing the app was keeping about your mail.

The smaller fixes

The file name proposed when you export a selection no longer eats the end of it. A Google Groups mailbox is named after the group — [email protected] — and the app was offering [email protected], because it trimmed anything after the last dot. The extension is now stripped only when it really is a mailbox one: .mbox, .eml, .mbs, .mbx.

Verifying the new tree on Windows turned up two more: folding the branch that contained the active label used to drop the filter silently, and opening a branch could move the selection.

And every link the app opens now points at mboxviewerpro.com — the website in About and Help, the privacy policy, and the marketing, support and privacy URLs in the store listing — opening the page in the language you are using the app in, instead of sending everyone to the English one. On the way there, a real bug turned up: the privacy link produced a 404 in Spanish, French, German and Portuguese, because the app built the address as /es/privacy/ while the site translates the address too (/es/privacidad/, /fr/confidentialite/, /de/datenschutz/). Those four reach the real page now, and Polish was added alongside them. The old domain redirects, so nothing you had bookmarked stops working.

Why the Mac jumps from 2.8.4 to 2.8.6

Because 2.8.5 was Windows-only: a printing fix that macOS never needed, shipped the same day it was reported. From here on the same number means the same thing on both platforms — 2.8.6 on Mac and 2.8.6 on Windows are the same release.

Getting them

Both arrive as ordinary updates from the Mac App Store and the Microsoft Store. The full list, release by release and platform by platform, is on the changelog.