FOIA Mailbox Reader

Turn PST/mbox public-record dumps into linkable, searchable static sites

Problem

Records obtained via FOIA or California PRA often arrive as PST or mbox archives that normal people cannot open without Apple Mail or Outlook desktop. Sharing them with colleagues or readers is painful, and linking to a specific email or thread is practically impossible. Existing tools like Jmail handle Gmail exports, but nobody solves publishing the raw mailbox as a website.

Solution

A local app that ingests PST/mbox, parses senders, dates and threads, and generates a Gmail-style reading site deployable to any static host. Every email and thread gets a stable URL, with full-text search, filters by agency/date, and original attachments available for download.

Users

Investigative journalists, civic journalists, academic researchers, public-interest legal groups, citizens tracking public records

MVP

Parse mbox and PST; group by thread and sort by date; export a static hostable HTML site; stable per-email links with full-text search; runs fully locally with no upload

Revenue

One-time desktop license ($29–$79), free for journalists and nonprofits; hosted publishing tier per site; private deployment for corporate compliance teams

Why now

AI has slashed the cost of PII redaction and summarization, letting a solo dev ship a tool journalists can trust locally; the core need does not depend on AI and can be validated by the parser alone