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Takeout engineer here. We currently use mboxo, but will be moving to mboxrd shortly.

That seems quite reasonable. Thanks for the info.

How is mbox a broken format? It's a bad idea to use it in a multi-writer environment, and it's horrible because there are competing versions of it. But for plain storage, I thought it worked quite well.

What am I missing?

Any line following a blank line and beginning with the four characters "From" marks the start of a new message. The BSD way of handling such lines in the body of a message was to prefix them with ">", which is a non-reversible workaround and is in the uuencode target charset.

Prefixing every line in the message body with a tab character would allow reversing and not interfere with uuencode/base64&c.

I've got mbsync set up to periodically dump my Gmail into a local Maildir archive. Works great, and it was a (relative) breeze to integrate with my old mail archives reaching back to the late 90's.