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Asked: 2026-05-10T13:47:50+00:00

I have the need to read the Thunderbird address book on the fly. It

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I have the need to read the Thunderbird address book on the fly. It is stored in a file format called Mork. Not a pleasant file format to read. I found a 1999 article explaining the file format. I would love to know if someone already has gone through this process and could make the code available. I found mork.pl by Jamie Zawinski (he worked on Netscape Navigator), but I was hoping for a .NET solution.

I’m hoping StackOverflow will come to the rescue, because this just seems like a waste of my time to write something to read this file format when it should be so simple.

I love the comments that Jamie put in his perl script. Here is my favorite part:

#   Let me make it clear that McCusker is a complete barking lunatic. #   This is just about the stupidest file format I've ever seen.
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  1. The Beagle search engine had code to parse Mork files. It’s not the most memory efficient solution, but it worked and could be a useful starting point. Here’s a link to the file:

    http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/beagle/tags/BEAGLE_0_2_18/Util/Mork.cs?view=markup

    (These days Beagle doesn’t use this parser anymore; we took the easier (and supported) path of writing a Thunderbird extension which just sent the data to Beagle itself. Has the disadvantage of not working while Thunderbird is closed, but has the advantage of not instilling the desire to bash your head in with the nearest blunt instrument.)

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