How to read .msg files on a Mac?

December 15, 2008 4:56 PM

I've got a bunch of (important) single .msg files that I want to read on my Mac (10.5.x). Any advice? Any tool that converts entire mailboxes doesn't seem to apply, and the only dedicated .msg reader I could find is broken. Renaming as .txt doesn't work either. Nor does Emailalchemy or NeoOffice. Help!
posted by Coherence Panda to computers & internet (8 comments total)

1. Change the file extension to .doc, open with Microsoft Word, when asked what format to convert from, choose HTML file.
2. You could also try changing the extension to .eml and then open in Entourage.
posted by ...possums at 5:21 PM on December 15, 2008

Here's something called MSGConvert that looks promising.
posted by xorry at 5:23 PM on December 15, 2008

Oh, and if they're relatively simple text-only emails you could probably open them (slightly scrambled) with TextWrangler, BBEdit, or SubEthaEdit.
posted by ...possums at 5:23 PM on December 15, 2008

Emailchemy will open Outlook files. Try the demo.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 5:45 PM on December 15, 2008

Do you happen to know what version of Outlook produced the .msg files?
posted by spock at 7:00 PM on December 15, 2008

Sometimes, if you simply concatenate individual message files together, then change the resulting file's extension to ".mbox", you can open/import it and get all the messages that way.

There are some edge cases that can make it not work, or make certain messages not come through, but I would give it a shot just for the heck of it.

If you have a whole folder full of .msg files, go into that folder ("cd /path/to/folder" in Terminal) and then type "cat *.msg > test.mbox". Then try importing the mbox into Mail.app or other MUA of your choice.

This assumes that Outlook creates .msg files that are "raw" messages with RFC822 header lines, which it may or may not; it does work for some other programs, though.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:51 PM on December 15, 2008

One of the above solutions will probably work for you, but if not then consider Aid4Mail. I used it to convert my entire PMMail (yes, OS/2) archive over to Thunderbird a few years ago and it's a fine little software utility. Windows only, probably, but I bet you can still find a way to use it to solve your problem.
posted by intermod at 8:06 PM on December 15, 2008

This can view Outlook 2003 .msg files on a Mac: http://www.puissancemac.ch/shop/index.php?show_aux_page=70 and save as RTF or HTML.
posted by spock at 9:26 PM on December 15, 2008