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.
Professionals who regularly work with E-Mail understand the importance of being able to batch convert a large number of .eml email files to a text format. Whether you need an easily searchable text version of E-Mails, or if you just need to capture basic E-Mail header information in a text format, EmlViewer Pro can help. This capability is included with every copy of EmlViewer Pro.
How to Convert .Eml to CSV
To follow along with this tutorial, download a free trial of EmlViewer Pro. The trial will allow you to export up to 50 E-Mails per export operation. This restriction is of course removed from the registered version of the software.
When EmlViewer Pro first starts, use the folder explorer on your left hand side to select the folder where your .eml files are stored. EmlViewer Pro will then read those E-Mail files into an organized list.
If you want to convert all of the E-Mails in the list to .csv/text, you can select them all for export by typing Ctrol-A. Selected E-Mails will be highlighted in blue.
Next select the Export tab.
From the drop down list, choose the CSV export profile, as shown in the image below.
Save Email Data to a CSV File.
Select CSV Export Profile
The last step is to click the “Export” button to begin the operation. EmlViewer Pro will proceed with saving the select .eml E-Mails into a text-based Comma Separated Values (CSV) file. The .CSV file will be written to a folder location that you indicate.
Clicking on the .CSV file will cause it to open in your default spreadsheet application. In the image below, the CSV file has been opened in Microsoft Office Excel 2013.
.Eml Files Imported to Microsoft Excel From a .CSV File.
The E-Mail content has now been organized into columns that include the following fields:
From, Subject, Date, To, CC, Message Body, file attachment information, and a link to the original .eml file.
These columns can re-arranged or deleted, searched or otherwise manipulated.
While the trial version of EmlViewer Pro restricts export operations to 50 E-Mails, there is no limited to the number of .Eml files that may be converted to .CSV in the registered version.
Please post your questions below and we’ll be glad to answer them. You can also chat with us using the chat button on this website, or email our support team at: supportline at encryptomatic.com
