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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)?

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  • 5
    Outlook Express actually has some really cool features that Outlook doesn't. Go figure.
    – Trevoke
    Feb 4, 2010 at 16:31
  • Outlook (paid version) can save as a .msg file, however.
    – Michael Paulukonis
    Oct 22, 2015 at 13:29
  • 10
    @Michael Paulukonis .msg-files are not .eml-files
    – Martin
    Oct 22, 2015 at 19:18
  • 1
    If you have OWA, see @jmiserez answer below for a simple/quick way to save EML format from OWA without a lot of extra steps or software.
    – Doug Knudsen
    Sep 18, 2019 at 20:46
  • None of the answers here mention an important caveat: Once Outlook and/or Exchange has stored its internal representation of a message, there is no guarantee that when you get back actually contains anything which was actually in the original message. A common symptom is the complete lack of all Received: headers in the exported message. Don't trust the MIME structures you get back, either. Everything is a rough approximation of what the original message looked like.
    – tripleee
    Feb 10, 2021 at 6:43

12 Answers 12

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42

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.
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  • 3
    I know this is old, but you saved my life! I had to get the headers of a few emails and that was the best solution I could find! No installation required, works reliably and above all, it's free and VERY easy to use! Thank you!
    – Ismael Miguel
    Apr 22, 2015 at 11:07
  • 7
    This program does not work with Outlook 2013. (Unsupported API)
    – Ivan Chau
    Dec 23, 2015 at 4:54
  • It will work with Outlook 2013 if installed with a standard MSI install. It doesn't work if installed with the Office 365 click-to-run installer (mfcmapi3.rssing.com/chan-4275860/all_p36.html#item710)
    – David Cornish
    Jan 18, 2017 at 22:05
  • 4
    Doesn't seem to work with Outlook 2016, I get an error message saying that it will only work with 2013 or newer
    – Steve
    Oct 9, 2018 at 10:58
  • 2
    Didn't worked for me. Used it with Outlook 365, got latest version. Didn't show any error or message, but the EML file was not (saved) in destination folder.
    – mimo
    Apr 24, 2019 at 12:23
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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). enter image description here
  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.
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  • 6
    This solution was the fastest and simpliest (no extra software) solution and worked like a charm. Thanks!
    – Doug Knudsen
    Sep 18, 2019 at 20:43
  • 1
    Great trick adding 2 emails as attach (can be the same email 2 times), for have the option "Download all attachments" available on received email. Warning all this must be done on web interface. Sent the email by web and open it on Outlook application will not work.
    – Manuel Romeiro
    Dec 18, 2020 at 0:40
16

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.

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  • 3
    Unfortunately this converts only to plain text .eml. All HTML formatting is missing.
    – briantist
    Feb 3, 2015 at 20:06
  • @briantist send me an example file please, I'll take a look.
    – maxt3r
    Feb 4, 2015 at 20:14
  • do you have an email or other method I could send you a file privately?
    – briantist
    Feb 4, 2015 at 20:31
  • 2
    @Michael that was a mistake on our side. Tweeting wasn't supposed to be required. All fixed and now you can use it without tweeting.
    – maxt3r
    Sep 26, 2016 at 13:59
  • 1
    Absolutely fantastic. No other solution I've tried has gotten me anything but a very basic email body – this included all the headers I needed. Hopefully this tool is around for another 5 years and beyond!
    – Sinjai
    Sep 27, 2021 at 20:25
8

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.

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  • 3
    This works as the best option for me, aside from writing my own program using Redemption. Most of the answers posting here are not acceptable in the financial world. Forwarding a bank statement to gmail and then viewing source? Seriously?
    – beeks
    Mar 5, 2015 at 15:23
  • Works with Outlook 2013.
    – Ivan Chau
    Jan 1, 2016 at 12:57
  • The provided link currently yeilds a server error page (perhaps only temporarily?), but the add-on can be downloaded directly here: outlookfreeware.com/download/OutlookMessagesExportEMLSetup.exe
    – Doin
    Nov 19, 2016 at 11:36
  • It works, it'll export messages in bulk, and it's FREE. This is the best answer.
    – Doin
    Nov 19, 2016 at 11:52
  • 2
    Not free for use in a commercial environment, and in fact won't run if you're on a domain.
    – jmiserez
    Aug 22, 2019 at 14:36
7

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

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  • 3
    This is the best, free, up-to-date tool to achieve email export tasks in the Windows ecosystem. Just came back from an hour of research of various tools/addins/etc. and, seriously, this is it.
    – joweiser
    Jan 23, 2012 at 15:20
2
  1. Send the email to a Hotmail or Outlook.com account
  2. View the Message Source
  3. Save as an .eml file
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  • 2
    This can be applied to other providers too, including gmail.
    – Malachi
    Jan 15, 2013 at 11:56
  • 9
    This will lose the original headers.
    – Ismael Miguel
    Apr 22, 2015 at 10:00
2

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.

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1

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.

:)

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1

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.

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    For me, on Outlook 2010, this just resulted in MSG files being attached, not EML
    – GrahamMc
    Feb 14, 2013 at 12:57
  • It worked perfectly here with Outlook 2013
    – Ángel
    Sep 16, 2015 at 14:18
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    Well it also didn't work for me in Outlook 2013 nor 2016. @Ángel are you sure that the attached mails are in .eml format, NOT in .msg ?
    – Michaël Polla
    Oct 8, 2015 at 13:03
  • @MichaëlPolla yes. The point was precisely to convert them to eml, the receiver side wasn't even able to open msg files. Perhaps there is a missing step above, like two ways of selecting several mails? In case it matters, the forwarded emails were using plain text (ie. no MIME).
    – Ángel
    Oct 8, 2015 at 22:06
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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.

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    yes it also worked for me. in particular it saved the images properly within the message, which other ways didn't.
    – Kidburla
    Apr 22, 2022 at 15:08
1

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/

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-2

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.

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