How to save a mail into an .eml-file with Outlook?

Question

Outlook Express and Thunderbird both support the .eml-file format. Somehow Outlook does not.

Is there any way to save mails into into an .eml-file using Outlook (e.g. with the help of a plugin)?

Answer 1

Seems like Outlook is lacking this feature. You can save the message as MSG and then convert it to EML. This can be done with the free developer tool called MFCMapi.

1. Save the message to Outlook Message Format (MSG) via File → Save As…
2. Download MFCMapi,
   • make sure you use version of MFCMapi matching your OL version (x64 for x64 outlook, x86 for x86 outlook).
3. Start it, go to Advanced → Import/Export → Convert MSG to EML.
4. Leave all the fields to default, press OK and choose the MSG file.
5. Save the EML file to the desired location.

Answer 2

None of the solutions worked with Outlook 2016, but there is a workaround using the OWA Webmail interface:

1. Open the OWA Webmail view to your list of emails
2. Click the "New" -> "Email message" button.
3. Drag the mail you want to export as .eml into the new email body from the sidebar. It will show up as an attachment.
4. Click the little arrow on the attachment, then "Download" in the menu (see screenshot).
5. You'll get a .eml file called "eml" which will contain the full original email including all headers and attachments.

On older (yellow) versions of the OWA web interface Outlook, you can do the following instead:

1. Create a new email draft
2. Drag two (2) mails into the draft
3. Send the email to yourself
4. Open the email you just sent and click on the "Download all attachments" button.

Answer 3

I often need to do this task, so I wrote an online utility to do that.

There are similar tools out there, but they are mostly full of ads and ask you to register first. There are just two steps in mine:

1. Upload an .msg
2. Download an .eml

Hope it'll be useful for someone.

Answer 4

I happen to have stumbled across this utility that might be a nice free add-on for Outlook http://www.outlookfreeware.com/en/products/all/OutlookMessagesExportEML/

Hope this helps. It really would've been nice if Outlook included this ability and maybe even the ability to export to "mbox" format so we can port it to a Unix mail system.

Answer 5

Mail Store Home is a program free for home use. It allows you to link a number of email programs (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, etc) and online email sources (Gmail, yahoo) to the one local Mail database. You run the program and it will access the email from the different locations or program you point it at and consolidate them into a single database. From there you can export the mail to any of the desktop programs. So in other words it will pull the mail from Outlook and export it into, say, Thunderbird for you

It is also a good way of backing up your email from multiple sources and make them searchable. Also an excellent way to back-up (and search) your on-line emails (like Gmail) on your desktop even when not online.

If you are only trying to convert a single email it may be overkill - but it works well

Answer 6

I got this to work in Gmail UI. Select the dropdown menu on the right of reply and select view original. Then copy paste the content into textpad save as filename.eml and select text file.

I havent figured this out in Outlook 2016 though.

Answer 7

1. Send the email to a Hotmail or Outlook.com account
2. View the Message Source
3. Save as an .eml file

Answer 8

ZamZar (https://www.zamzar.com/) can do the conversion from .msg to .eml on-line. The site shows ads and they require your email address to deliver the result link into, but conversion works ok.

Answer 9

Export the message(s) to a pst file, then copy it to a linux box and use readpst to extract the individual messages to eml. This was really easy and the only free solution I could find. Extracted 1500 emails from a 128MB pst in around 30 seconds on a budget machine.

apt-get install readpst
readpst -S -o /path/to/output/ /path/to/input.pst

The files will be numbered with no extension, but they are eml. Any attachments will also be in there.

Found here: https://dereknewton.com/2011/02/searching-and-extracting-data-from-pst-files/

Answer 10

Bit of a drawn out process, but fairly simple:

Open Outlook and Outlook express on your computer.

In Outlook Express:

• Select Import > Messages from the File menu.
• Select Microsoft Outlook from the dialog box and press Next.
• Select the folder (or all) that you want to convert. Press Next.
• After importing, press next.
• Find the imported folder and highlight all the messages - Drag them to a folder and they will be saved as .eml format.

:)

Answer 11

Let's call this a little "cheat", but it works perfectly (at least in Outlook 2010) and it's very, very easy.

Go to your inbox, select at least one email that you want to export as .eml, right click, and select "Forward". Outlook will open ONE new email, attaching all others as .eml-files. Just send them to you or any other account.

Answer 12

You're looking to convert your PST file to EML.

I can't find any free tools to do this, but this seems to do the job, and the demo may or may not get it done.