Drag and drop issue from New Outlook

Hello,

TLDR; starting this morning, drag and drop from New Outlook results in subject being changed to long alpha-numeric string.

MacBook Pro M1 Max; EagleFiler 1.9.11; Microsoft Outlook for Mac V16.74 (Office 365).

I have been using New Outlook for a while (maybe a year or more), and since the capture key does not work (no AppleScript support yet), I have been successfully importing messages to EagleFiler via drag and drop.

My normal workflow is to highlight the message or messages in Outlook and then drag to the “Unfiled” folder in EagleFiler. From there, I reorganize as need to appropriate folders in the library and then eventually run a Merge Mailboxes command.

Starting this morning, all of my messages in EagleFiler have a long alpha-numeric string as the subject. To me this seems like the unique identifier for the message. In EagleFiler, I can open the info inspector and still see that the email has the correct subject in the file name field.

Since the subject was in the file name, I used a Filename to Title AppleScript. Seemed to work great until I moved the individual emails and ran the Merge Mailboxes command. The resulting messages in the merged mailboxes all reverted to the alpha-numeric subject, and now the filename is set to the name of the mailbox, so the original subject is lost.

Tried restarting the computer and relaunching both Outlook and EagleFiler, but this issue is persisting. Appreciate any suggestions. Thanks

I am not seeing that behavior here with Outlook 16.74. Would you be able to send me a couple of the .eml files so that I can look into whether there’s an issue with how Outlook is generating them or how EagleFiler is reading them?

The Merge Mailboxes command does not preserve custom titles, from names, or source URLs. Those get reset to the values stored in the e-mail message. (It does preserve tags and notes that you’ve added.) But this shouldn’t be an issue in your case because the correct information should be in the raw message data.

Thanks for sending the files. It looks like Outlook is writing incorrect information into the .eml file that it creates during drag and drop. Specifically, it is putting the value of the Thread-Topic header where the Subject should be. As this affects drag and drop from Outlook to any app, I suggest that you report this to Microsoft.

I reported this to Microsoft.

In EagleFiler, is there anyway to edit the title (subject) for individual email messages once they are incorporated into an mbox? Outside of EagleFiler?

I haven’t deleted the EagleFiler trash yet, so I still have access to the individual .eml files. As an alternative, it looks like I can manually edit each original .eml file to change the subject, save, then drop back into EagleFiler. If this issue persists for me, I’ll probably need to write a script to automate the process.

Thank you for troubleshooting this.

No, for performance reasons it gets the subjects from the mbox file itself.

That will usually work, though, since .eml files are not actually text files, it’s possible that this could damage some messages if they contain fragments of non-ASCII text in another encoding.

Does it export any better if you use File ‣ Save As… ‣ Email Message instead of drag and drop?

Does it export any better if you use File ‣ Save As… ‣ Email Message instead of drag and drop?

No, same issue.

I’m having a hard time pinpointing the start of this issue. The earliest email that had this issue was dated 31 May. I transferred it to EagleFiler this morning (drag and drop). The only different thing about that email was the sender requested a read-receipt, which I declined. After that email, all messages dated after 09 June show the same issue, but any message still in my inbox with a date before 09 June do not show the issue…

That will usually work, though, since .eml files are not actually text files, it’s possible that this could damage some messages if they contain fragments of non-ASCII text in another encoding.

Good to know, thanks.

Reverting to Legacy Outlook fixes this issue for me, at least temporarily, until Microsoft automatically switches it back to New Outlook on the next computer restart.

Switching from New Outlook to Legacy Outlook and back to New Outlook does not fix the issue. Uninstalling and reinstalling Outlook and then switching into New Outlook does not fix the issue. Haven’t tried completely removing all off Office 365 and starting from scratch. Also haven’t found any MS or general forum posts about a similar issue.

1 Like

Reverting to Old Outlook fixes the problem for messages that were downloaded from the server using New Outlook? That is good news indeed.

Yes. The same email message. In New Outlook after dragging the email to EagleFiler, the .eml has the incorrect subject. Switch to Legacy Outlook and after dragging the same email to EagleFiler, the .eml has the correct subject.

Of course this didn’t fix the 43 messages that I had already deleted out of Outlook, but luckily, none of the .eml files were corrupted after I fixed the subject lines by opening and saving them in Sublime Text then bringing them back to EagleFiler.

Never heard back from Microsoft, but as of this afternoon, drag and drop from New Outlook is working again.

1 Like