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.
worked like a charm! many many thanks.
Worked like a charm! Many thanks for the tip.
I keep trying to use the viewer but it snags at 20% everytime. Is my pfc currupted?
The only reason im useing this program is because aol no longer sees my pfc and I have lost the last 8 years of work. Any advice appreciated.
I’m stumped. Are there any instructions for using the viewer? I’ve tried a lot of things and got a list of my favorites titles, but cannot get the addresses. I started by copying my favorites from AOL to my desktop. Then I opened the file in the pfcviewer. When I import or export the list to Internet Explorer, I get a list of what appears to be highlighted titles, but when I click on them, I get “Internet Explorer cannot display that page” and gives the location as my desktop. What am I doing wrong? Please help … I feel like with your help so far, I’m soooo close.
GREAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nicely done. Thank you for sharing.
Tom
thanks so much i thought i had lost all my daughters college info and my old clients info after my aol became infected and i had to reinstall aol and found no saved on my pc file
Thank You so much!! I have been wanting to delete my AOL software for so long but could not find a way to access my saved mail. You are brilliant!
Thanks for releasing pfcview. I want to use this tool to recover some emails from a pfc file, however, there are a few limitations I need to overcome:
1) The “newmail” folder view limits email addresses (From/To) to 17 characters and subject lines to 46. Perhaps that’s a limitation of the PFC file, but that doesn’t seem likely to me.
2) There’s no way to send output anywhere other than the screen. I’ve had to resort to OCR’ing screen captures. (yuck!)
Any chance I can get the source? Or perhaps you’d be willing to make some modifications yourself? Email me if you want to discuss further.
@John:
Make sure you save the file with a .jar extension.
(the link above links to pfcview.jar. Make sure in Windows it’s actually saved with .jar and not some other random file extension).
To Mike: Also can’t get ti to run; save what with the jar ext ?
John
JESUS JOSEPH AND MARY IN TINSELTOWN! This is exactly what I have been looking for. Thank you to everybody who made this program possible! Wonderful!
Thankyouthankyouthankyou.
I had heard rumors about this but never actually found it until today.
You are so fabulous.
It works great, though reading these old emails shows me my day was just as mundane in 1999.
Thank you all over again!
Oh my God this is amazing. Thank you!!!
Just re-downloaded it and made sure I saved it with the .jar extension this time. Yep that did it for me. awesome
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.