I need to archive a bunch of messages from an Outlook account that I can only access on a work PC. The messages are exported as .msg files into a folder by secretaries and are not easy to search there. So I figured they would be much better on my Mac in EagleFiler. The problem is that, as far as I can see, they need to be converted to mbox or eml first.
Is there any way to get EF to do this conversion?
If not, can anyone suggest a good utility that can do this?
It’s hard to open .msg files on the Mac. It’s a Microsoft-specific format even the Mac version of Outlook can’t read. I’m looking into adding direct support for .msg to EagleFiler, but currently you would need to use some other utility to convert the files too .eml or mbox format. These pages list some utilities, although it seems like most of them are no longer being maintained. If anyone knows of a good converter utility, please post it here.
It would be great if EF could import .msg files directly. In the meantime, I’ve tried to get my messages into EF using various methods. I purchased MailRaiderPro, a converter, on the app store. It seems to work correctly.
I then sent two messages to my outlook account on a PC and exported them as .msg files (by drag and drop) to OneDrive. I then retrieved these through OneDrive on my Mac and converted them to .eml using MailRaiderPro. I imported one of them (test 1) into Mail and then put it into EF by drag and drop. The other one (test 2) I put into EF directly from the finder.
In both cases, EF has the same problem: the diacritics are not converted correctly. They appear correctly in Mail and in MailRaiderPro but in EF the title, for instance, shows as Test msg éèà ùç 2 instead of Test msg éèàùç 2.
How to fix this?
This usually happens if the e-mail is malformed and doesn’t specify its text encoding. That forces the mail program to guess. EagleFiler will by default guess a Mac encoding, but you can use DefaultMessageEncoding in the esoteric preferences to change it to something else like ISO Latin 1 or UTF-8.
OK, I did this. The title of the message now appears correctly, but not the message itself. Here’s a line from it:
• the acute accent (née) and grave accent (English poetry marking, changèd), modifying vowels or marking stresses
which should be:
• the acute accent (née) and grave accent (English poetry marking, changèd), modifying vowels or marking stresses
If you export a problem message and e-mail it to me as an attachment, I can take a look and see which encoding it should be in or whether there’s a bug in how EagleFiler is reading it.
Thanks for sending the test message. The problem seems to be that the data generated by MailRaider specifies the wrong text encoding. I’ve added a workaround in EagleFiler 1.8.12b3 (currently in public beta).
The encoding after conversion from .msg to .eml by MailRaider Pro is now correct in EF.
Many thanks. You’re the best!