MSG to TXT — read an Outlook message as plain text
Open a .msg file without Outlook and save it as plain text: sender, date, subject, the message and what was attached to it.
About this conversion
A .msg is a small Microsoft database, which is why a text editor shows it as a wall of symbols with a few readable words in the middle. Reading the structure properly and writing out only what a person needs turns that into an ordinary text file — the shape you want when a message has to go into a report, a ticket, or an email to somebody who does not use Outlook either.
Just want to look inside it?
The same tool without converting anything: open a .msg file and read it.
You are not locked into TXT
The file is parsed once and stays open, so the format is picked at the end rather than the beginning: the same .msg can leave here as CSV, XLSX, ZIP, EML, MBOX, PDF, HTML or JSON. Before that you can search it by subject or address, filter by year, sender and attachment type, mark the duplicates and look through the archive overview.
Questions
- Do I need Outlook installed?
- No. The file is read here, on any operating system.
- Is a forwarded message inside kept?
- Yes. A message attached inside another one is unpacked and written out with it.
- Are Unicode subjects handled?
- Yes — Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese and Japanese subjects and names come through as they were written, not as question marks.