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Comment by subarctic | Hacker News Reader

How do you open a .eml file? I downloaded a bunch of emails as . eml files recently when I was organizing my expenses, and couldn't find a good way to open them on my computer to look at them.

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Use the ImportExportTools extension in Thunderbird: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/impor...

… if you have Thunderbird installed, and emails (.eml files) are associated with it, all you have to do is open the file. (E.g., … double click the .eml file.)

for a brief period I had to correspond with a lawyer whose mail program generated them; I discovered that you could simply double click them in Apple Mail and they would open.

Given that APple preferes to rewrite rather than bug-fix/upgrade I have no idea if that's still true; haven't seen one in many years.

If you drag a message out from Apple Mail, say to the desktop, it will save that message as a .eml file. And if you inspect it, it's simply the raw message itself — as it would be in, say, a Maildir folder. You can literally 'cat' the file. Unless there are multiple versions of '.eml' that have different formats...

Opening in Gmail is the easiest for me, as I don't have desktop email clients configured.

Just send the .eml files as attachments to yourself in a gmail or gapps account. When you click the attachment preview on the received message, it pops out a window displaying the email rendered as if it was sent/received in gmail. Includes inline MIME images too. You can print rendered pages from there.

I found this feature pretty neat! And a bit unexpected.

You know what, I think I actually did that. I remember now, it worked for some emails, but some of them it said were malformed and it couldn't open them (even though I use gmail to generate them in the first place).

I'd give ytnef and libpst a try. They both come with a command line tool suite for working with Outlook files.

https://github.com/Yeraze/ytnef

https://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/

I started the 'eml-client' in github.com/OJFord/amail as a way of viewing them rendered (they are plaintext files, so one answer is you can just read in less or whatever, depending what you need to see).

However fairly early on I discovered notmuch, so then switched it from being a viewer for just a bunch of eml on disk to a GUI notmuch client. So if you want to use a recent version of it you'd need also to install notmuch (it's very lightweight) and create its index pointing to your eml directory.

It's very much a slow WIP, afaik I'm its only user, no releases you'd have to build from source, etc. - but happy to help if you're interested.

I wanted to use .eml files for local development: instead of sending real emails to make sure the content is formatted properly, why not just save a file somewhere and open it with a viewer.

However I couldn't find an application for just viewing emails.

For the businesspeople in my office, the answer is to just leave them in your mailbox until the retention policy gets them, or print them to PDF. I don't think anyone works with .eml directly.

In the early days of my IT career I had an executive who had his secretary print all of his emails on paper and put them in an IN box on his desk... Never had an IT complaint from him either. FYI, this was in the mid 2000s, how the meteor missed him, I have no idea.

Outlook would probably be my first guess, but I also don't see many folks having the full Outlook client these days unless it's a work computer and your company uses Microsoft.

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