If you were a hardcore internet user any time back in the 90’s, chance are good that at one point or another you had an AOL account. If that’s the case, you may have also saved/archived your old email into an AOL Personal Filing Cabinet, or .PFC file.
Unfortunately, the AOL PFC is a proprietary file format for archiving e-mail and can’t be read by Outlook or most other common mail viewers.
That’s where PFC Viewer comes in. At one point in time, a savvy developer created a java-based PFC viewer that would inspect the contents of an AOL PFC file and let you get access to all of your old e-mail without installing the client. Sadly, his original website and code went missing, but through some determined investigating of my own, I was able to found the source and original release.
Download Link: http://www.imasuper.com/myuploads/2009/12/pfcview.jar
Download the JAR file and double-click to open. Then navigate to File > Open and open your PFC. And there’s your old email.
The original PFC Viewer was released under the MIT software license, which allows me to provide a download link to the application here without cause for license violation.
Awesome software.
sorry i must be ignorant, i can not get this to work when i down load the pfc viewer and extract files to java folder and then try to open up the pfc save files the dos prompt just flashes and nothing happens,any help would be appriciated
All done… Thanks.
Just re-downloaded it and made sure I saved it with the .jar extension this time.
Thanks, “Priv”…. It says it’s a Zip file… even if I rename, it stil says pfcviewer.jar.zip.
Tried using Open with… no success… not sure which Java to select….
Can’t get to a DOS prompt from vista… forgot how…
Any other thoughts? Gracias.
David,
Since you took the time to ask, I’ll take the time to respond
It looks like you have java installed, but .jar files aren’t associated with java, so windows is just decompressing the jar instead of trying to run it.
Try opening up a command console (“DOS Prompt”) and running the application from within Java, using your java root path.
For example, if Java is located at c:\j2sdk1.4.2_02\bin\java, you would run this from your console:
C:\j2sdk1.4.2_02\bin\java -jar pfcviewer.jar
Make sure you copy pfcviewer.jar into your java folder, or tell java the full path to your file, like so:
C:\j2sdk1.4.2_02\bin\java -jar “C:\users\me\downloads\pfcviewer.jar”
Hopefully this helps.
java is running … but all i get are a bunch of zipped “CLASS” files? What did i do wrong?
Many thanks its working great
I’m trying to open my old pfc AOL email files. Can’t get the hang of it. Java platform is installed. Also downloaded IZArc which did open the program. But I can’t open the pfc file to view. Please help. Many thanks.
Cindy
I waited years to find a way to read my old AOL email. Back then I wasn’t even sure of what files to save from the AOL folder. Now I can get a glimpse of what was going on all the way back to 97.
Thanks very much for your article.