What is a .eml file? How can I open it? This blog has helpful tips for users of our Eml Viewer software who need to search, convert and PDF .eml email files.
So you have a Windows Mail .eml file? What is it, and how can you see what is in it?
It is common to see.eml files as email attachments. To understand them, let’s consider how a .eml file may come to exist. If you are a Windows Live Mail user, you may find that the process to save a e-mail message as a .eml file is quite simple. Knowing how this is done makes it easy to share messages with someone without having to forward the message. Sometimes the context of the email message is best preserved when the message is shared in its entirety as a separate file. EML files can simply be included in an email message as a file attachments, while a forwarded message is more susceptible to manipulation.
To create a .eml file using Windows Live Mail, start by going to the program’s main menu. Second, single click on any email displayed in the message list (don’t open it, just highlight it). Third, click the the far left button in the tool ribbon, choose “Save as File,” and the select a location to save the file. Your message will be saved as a .eml file.
Saving a Windows Mail message as .eml (1)
In Windows Mail, save the message as a .eml file
Another way to create a .eml file from Windows Live Mail is to just drag it out of the inbox and drop it on your desktop. That works, too.
What is a .EML file?
If you want to get technical about it, a file with a .eml extension should conform to RFC-2822, the internet message format. This standard establishes a common syntax for text messages so they can be sentbetween computer users as e-mail. Each .eml file contains a single email message (unless of course another .eml file is embedded inside of the .eml file, but each .eml file is really a separate instance of an email message).
Most .EML files you will encounter are created by popular email clients such as Microsoft Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, or Mozilla Thunderbird. To create a .eml file using either of those two email clients, all you have to do is drag an email message from the inbox and drop it on your desktop. Voila! Instant .eml file which will contain a header in plain ASCII text, the main body of the message (text or html), and any file attachments associated with the email, such as spreadsheets, jpg pictures, videos, or text documents.
.EML files can range in size from 1 kilobyte to many megabytes, depending of course on what the sender has chosen to put into the file.
The truth is, not all .eml files conform exactly to RFC-2822. In the wild, you are likely to encounter many exceptions. Different software products that generate .eml files sometimes fail to implement the entire RFC standard. When this happens, emails may not be formatted correctly, or are unable to be opened. PstViewer Pro is a .eml viewer software application that has identified dozens of these exceptions, and is therefore able to render many non-standard .eml files.
Often many email messages are grouped into larger files, such as a .PST file (Outlook) or a MBOX file (Thunderbird). While Thunderbird and Windows Mail will allow you to save a single message as a .eml file, Microsoft Outlook does not allow this. Rather, Outlook saves individual emails as a .msg file, which is a Microsoft Office message format that is not RFC-2822 compatible. As of Outlook 2010, Microsoft Outlook does not save email messages as .eml files. MessageExport is a third party add-in for Microsoft Outlook that adds this ability to Outlook, allowing Outlook emails to be stored in EML format.
A .eml file is an individual email message that has been moved outside of an email client, such as Mozilla Thunderbird. EML files may contain pictures, file attachments, email metadata, and more.
Its very common to receive email messages that are formatted either as Text (.TXT) or HTML files. Embedding HTML in emails lets the sender mark up the text. They can add formatting, titles, colors, images and logos to their email messages.
Download .Eml Viewer by Encryptomatic LLC.
In an earlier article, we described how to convert .eml to text files with EmlViewer Pro (also known as PstViewer Pro), the email https://www.emlviewer.net/2013/08/19/how-to-convert-multiple-eml-email-into-text-files/viewer software for Windows that lets you discover and convert email messages. If plain old text files are too boring for you, let us show you how to convert .eml email files directly into HTML documents. You could even post them to your web server, if you like, for the entire internet to see.
Converting .EML to .HTML Files
Saving a .eml email file as html file will save the HTML code to a .html file. Instead of having all of the elements contained in a single .eml file, an email converted from .eml to .html will be broken apart, just like a regular web page. The individual elements will be stored as separate files that are linked from the resulting .html page. Any embedded elements, like pictures, will be stored in a folder.
Converting .eml files to .html is useful if you want to preserve the email content, but also want easy access to embedded images or file attachments.
Although we are describing how to convert .eml to .html, this same process can be used with EmlViewer Pro to create html files from emails stored in .msg, .pst, .ost and .mht files. You can convert one email to html, or bulk convert thousands of emails to .html.
Eml Viewer Pro
If you would like to follow along with the step by step instructions, download a 15 day free trial of EmlViewer Pro software (also known as PstViewer Pro)for Microsoft Windows by Encryptomatic LLC. EmlViewer Pro is also known as PstViewer Pro. At one time EmlViewer Pro and PstViewer Pro were separate products, but they have recently been combined into a single more powerful product able to process many different email formats.
Step 1 Start EmlViewer Pro. Using the folder explorer on the left side of the screen, select the folder containing your .Eml Files. The emails will be viewable in the EmlViewer Pro mail list.
Step 2 Select the Eml files you want to convert to HTML. Selected files will appear highlighted in the mail list.
Selected emails are highlighted
Step 3 Select the target export format “HTML”
Choose HTML export profile
Step 4 Click the “Export” button to begin the export process.
The Eml files will now be converted into Html. Lets take a look at the folder and see how the files are organized.
Notice that the folder contains .html files that use the email Subject line as the file name. The image elements for emails that contain them will be placed in a sub folder, which will share the same name as the html file. Folder organization keeps the email elements (images and file attachments) from being mingled with other emails.
Folder structure of emails converted to HTML files
To view the email as a HTML page, click on it, and Windows will open it in your web browser,
An Email that has been converted to a HTML file, displayed in Google Chrome web browser.
If you have any questions about EmlViewer Pro, post them below, or use the online chat service here to talk to a support technician.
