Converting Outlook .PST Emails to MBOX Format with Eml Viewer Pro

Are you leaving Microsoft Outlook for another email client?  Most non-Outlook clients are unable to import Outlook .pst/.ost files because the format is proprietary to Microsoft.  A workaround is to convert your Outlook .pst emails into an open email format called MBOX, or MBX.

For converting email files to different formats, EmlViewer Pro by Encryptomatic LLC (also known as PstViewer Pro) is a helpful and affordable Windows software tool.  EmlViewer Pro can read in files such as Outlook .pst, .ost, .eml, and .msg, then output the emails to different target formats, including MBOX, CSV, HTML, PDF, image files like PNG, GIF, and more.

Today’s lesson is focused on showing you how to use EmlViewer Pro to convert Outlook .pst files directly to .mbox.  MBOX is an open format that is supported by most email clients (other than Outlook) including Mozilla Thunderbird.
The first step is to open EmlViewer Pro and choose your .pst file.  Each email in the Pst file will be displayed on a line in the mail list.
Next, click on EmlViewer Pro’s “Export” menu tab, then select “MBOX from the drop down list. The partial screen shot below shows the Export menu with MBOX selected.
Screen shot of PstViewer Pro Export menu with MBOX selected.
Export Menu in EmlViewer Pro software.
Next, select the emails you want to add to the MBOX file from EmlViewer Pro’s mail list. To select all emails, type CTRL-A.  Selected emails are highlighted in blue.  You can select all emails, a range of emails, or just certain emails.
To begin the export process, click the yellow “Export” button.
EmlViewer Pro will display a status window that shows the progress of your conversion.
If you have any questions, please post them in the comments here, or use our live chat to talk with us!

How to Export Email Addresses From .Eml Files To CSV/Excel?

Screen image of Microsoft Excel.

 .Eml files are text files that contain individual email messages. They have been formatted in a special manner that is described in a standards document called RFC-822.   Software that understands this text encoding can display the contents of the email message, including file attachments (yes, even binary files are encoded as text in an .eml file).  Virtually any standard email client can open .eml files, including Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, etc.

While email clients can open individual .eml files, they fall short when it comes to searching and managing a directory filled with hundreds or thousands of these files.  EML Viewer Pro is a specialized viewer for both .eml and Outlook .msg files. It lets you analyze the contents of thousands of .eml files and even convert them to different formats.

Saving Email Addresses in .Eml Files to .CSV Format

A customer wrote us recently and said that when she decided to leave her ISP’s email service for Gmail, the only way she could take her emails with her was to download them as a large batch of .eml files. She then wanted to create a list of her email contacts.  To accomplish this, she used EML Viewer Pro to export the email messages to a comma separated values (.CSV) file which she could then import into Microsoft Excel.

Here are the steps you can take to save email addresses from .eml files into an Excel spreadsheet.

First, download a trial of EML Viewer Pro (also known as PstViewer Pro). You can use the free trial for 15 days.

Then, select the folder where your .eml email files are stored. This can be a local, network or cloud folder, as long as it appears in your Windows folder structure.  When the folder is selected, EML Viewer Pro will read in the email messages and display them in a list.

You can use the sort and search functions to find emails that are important to you.

Form for searching your .eml email files.
EML Search Window

Any .eml files that match your search query will appear in the list. You can select messages to export individually, or you can select all of them. To select all, type “Ctrol-A.”

The final step is to tell EML Viewer Pro the format that we want to export the selected .eml files to. In this case, we want to collect the email addresses from our .eml files, so we’ll tell EML Viewer Pro to convert the selected emails into a .CSV file.   To do this, look to the toolbar, and select the export profile called “CSV,” then click the yellow and green Export button to start the operation.

Animated gif shows how to select the Eml to CSV export profile in EmlViewer Pro software for MS Windows.
Select CSV export profile.

EML Viewer Pro will begin converting your .eml emails into an organized .CSV file. Various fields will be copied from the .eml file into corresponding columns in the .CSV file.

In this image, we have opened the CSV file in Microsoft Office Excel.  The email content is now fully available to be analyzed and manipulated in Excel.

creen image of MS Excel with email content imported from CSV file.
CSV File with Email Content Imorted to MS Excel

If you are converting thousand of emails, it may take it several minutes to complete the operation.  At the end, you’ll have a .csv file that has the main email data fields separated into into columns.  Use Excel’s de-duplication function to remove any duplicate email addresses.

That’s all there is to it!  Download your EML Viewer Pro free trial from here.