Opens an email that was saved to a file - an Outlook .msg, or an .eml from Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Gmail or almost anything else - and shows it the way a mail program would: sender, recipients, date, the formatted body with its inline pictures, and the attachments, each of which can be saved on its own. An email attached inside an Outlook .msg or an .eml is opened and read here rather than saved as a file.
The .msg format is Outlook’s own, so without Outlook installed an .msg attachment tends to open as nothing at all. That is usually a forwarded email, an exported case file or something a colleague dragged out of their inbox. Emails are also about the most personal files there are, which is why this one reads them in the page instead of sending them anywhere. Remote images are blocked until you ask for them. It is free to use, with no account and no upload limit, and it runs entirely in your browser: nothing is uploaded, and while the page stays open, a feature you have already used keeps working offline.
- 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.
- Can it turn an .msg into a PDF?
- Yes, through your browser’s print dialog: Print / PDF lays out the header and the body on a page, and choosing Save as PDF as the printer writes the file. Attachments are listed by name but not included, so save any you need separately.
- 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 RTF, and that is what gets shown. Some - usually ones written in Outlook’s rich-text mode - have no HTML at all, and then only the plain-text version exists to show.
- Can it open Outlook calendar invites and contacts saved as .msg?
- It opens them, and says what kind of item it is, but it shows only the title, the notes and any attachments. For the dates of a calendar invite, an .ics file and the Calendar Viewer do a much better job.