Opens emails that were saved to files - Outlook .msg files, and .eml files from Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Gmail or almost anything else - and shows each one the way a mail program would: sender, recipients, date, the formatted body with its inline pictures, and the attachments. Each attachment can be saved on its own, all of them saved as one .zip, or opened straight in the tool on this site that reads it. An email attached inside another one opens here too, instead of being saved as a file.
It also converts: Save as PDF turns the email into a PDF file straight away, with no print dialog - EML to PDF and MSG to PDF alike - with its attachments carried inside the PDF and, if you like, attached PDFs and pictures added as pages after it. No email to hand? Try a sample email opens a made-up one with a PDF, a picture and a meeting invitation attached.
Drop one email, or a whole folder of them: several files open as a list, newest first, that you can search by subject, sender, recipient, attachment name and the words in the message. That is the quick way through an exported case file, a folder of saved receipts or a colleague’s handover. The list can be saved as PDFs - one per email in a .zip, or all in one PDF with a bookmark for each - and as a CSV of senders, recipients, dates, subjects and attachment names that opens in Excel.
Emails are about the most personal files there are, which is why this viewer reads them in the page instead of sending them anywhere. Remote images are blocked until you ask for them, and the message is shown in a sandbox that cannot run scripts.
On Windows, a double-clicked .msg opens in classic Outlook; the new Outlook for Windows opens .msg files only with some Microsoft 365 accounts, and without Outlook Windows has nothing to open one with. An .eml usually opens in whatever mail program is set up, or in nothing if none is. On a Mac, Apple Mail opens .eml but not .msg. Phones are worse: an .msg sent as an attachment usually shows as a file nothing can preview.
This page works the same on all of them - Windows, Mac, Linux, a Chromebook, an iPhone or an Android phone - in any current browser. On a phone, tap the box and pick the file from Files or Downloads.
- Why do some images say they were blocked?
- Pictures stored inside the email are shown straight away. Pictures that live on the sender’s server are not, because fetching one tells that server the message was opened, when, and from which network - which is exactly what tracking pixels in marketing mail are for. Press Load them if you trust the sender.
- How do I convert an MSG file to PDF?
- Open the .msg and press Save as PDF. The PDF is made in the page and downloads at once, with no print dialog: the subject, From, To, Cc, date and the names of the attachments at the top, then the formatted body with the pictures that came inside the email, as real text you can select and search. The attachments themselves go inside the PDF as files - open the attachments panel (the paperclip) in your PDF reader to save them - and, with the box ticked, attached PDFs and JPG or PNG pictures follow the email as pages. A locked or damaged PDF stays inside as a file only, and an email attached inside an Outlook message is not included (open it and save it on its own). The layout is the page’s own, so an elaborate newsletter comes out plainer than in Outlook; if a message’s formatting cannot be laid out at all, its plain text is used. Letters beyond Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or emoji, are left out, and the page says so. Print is still there for your browser’s own print dialog.
- How do I convert EML to PDF?
- The same way: open the .eml (or .emlx) and press Save as PDF. Pictures on the internet that the email only links to are not fetched for the PDF, for the same reason they are blocked on the page - fetching them tells the sender you opened it - so they are left out, and the page says how many.
- Can I convert many emails to PDF at once?
- Yes. Drop them all, or Open a whole folder of emails, and in the list press PDFs (.zip) for one PDF per email - named by date and subject - in a .zip, or One PDF for all of them in a single PDF with a bookmark for each email. Only the emails shown are saved, so search first to narrow the list. The emails are read and written one at a time, and Cancel stops part-way.
- Can I export a list of emails to Excel?
- Yes: List (.csv) saves one row per email shown, with From, To, Cc, the date (in ISO form, in UTC), subject, the number of attachments and their names, and the file it came from. It is UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, so Excel shows accents and other alphabets correctly, and a cell that starts like a formula (with =, +, - or @) gets a ' in front so a spreadsheet does not run it.
- Is there a sample email to try it with?
- Yes. Try a sample email, under the drop box, opens a made-up Outlook message written for this page: invented people at example.com addresses, a formatted body with a table and a small logo, headers with a route and sender checks, a meeting invitation, a two-page PDF and a picture. It is fetched (about 60 KB) only when you press the button.
- Can I convert an MSG file to EML?
- Yes. Open the .msg and press .eml: the message is written out as a standard MIME email with its sender, recipients, date, subject, the plain and formatted bodies and every attachment, and an Outlook message attached inside it becomes an attached .eml. Pictures in the body are kept inside the HTML. Outlook-only details such as categories, flags and read receipts have no place in an .eml and are left out. An .eml you opened is saved back exactly as it came.
- How do I put a lot of .eml or .msg files into Outlook?
- Outlook opens them one at a time only. The EML to PST Converter puts any number of them - or a whole folder, or an mbox mailbox - into one .pst file that Outlook opens with all its folders.
- What is the difference between an .eml and an .msg file?
- Both are one saved email. An .eml is the standard internet format (MIME, RFC 5322): plain text that Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Gmail downloads and most other programs write. An .msg is Outlook’s own format, a Microsoft compound file of MAPI properties that only Outlook opens, which is why renaming one to the other does not work. This page reads both the same way, with the attachments ready to save.
- How can I tell if an email is genuine or spoofed?
- Open Headers & route. The sender checks show what the receiving server found: SPF says whether the server that sent it was allowed to send for that domain, DKIM whether the domain’s signature on the message checked, and DMARC whether those line up with the address in From. A fail on DMARC with a From address of a bank or a colleague is a strong sign of a fake. The route lists every server the email went through, earliest first. Only the receiving server’s own results are used, since anything lower down the headers could have been written by the sender; when it left none, a forwarding server’s record is shown instead and labelled as such. The page reports what those servers wrote; it does not check the signatures itself.
- Can it open signed or encrypted (S/MIME) emails?
- Signed ones, yes: the message inside an smime.p7m is taken out and shown, and for both kinds of signed email the signature is checked, saying whether the text was changed after it was signed and whose certificate signed it. The certificate is not checked against any authority, so it does not prove who the signer really is. An encrypted email can only be opened with the recipient’s private key, which never leaves their mail program, so the page says it is encrypted rather than showing it.
- Is the email sent anywhere to be read?
- No. The .msg is unpacked in the page by msgreader, and an .eml by postal-mime. The body is shown in a sandboxed frame that cannot run scripts, so a hostile message cannot do anything to the page either.
- Why does the message look plainer than it did in Outlook?
- Most Outlook messages keep an HTML copy of the body tucked inside compressed RTF, and that is what gets shown. Some - usually ones written in Outlook’s rich-text mode - have no HTML at all, and then their text is read from the RTF without its formatting.
- Can it open Outlook calendar invites and contacts saved as .msg?
- Yes. A calendar item shows its start and end, place and whether it repeats, and a contact its email address, company, job title, phone numbers, address and web page, along with any notes and attachments. A meeting invitation sent as an ordinary email (an .ics inside it) shows as a card at the top; for a whole calendar, the Calendar Viewer lays it out by day, week or month.
- What is a winmail.dat attachment?
- An email Outlook sent in its rich-text format, as it reached a mail program other than Outlook: the attachments and formatting are packed inside winmail.dat. Use Open in beside it, or the winmail.dat opener, to get the files out.