Open outlook.msg files in thunderbird

Discussion of general topics about Mozilla Thunderbird
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sampipe
Posts: 1
Joined: January 11th, 2005, 9:28 pm

Open outlook.msg files in thunderbird

Post by sampipe »

Hi All,

I'm wondering if there is any plugin or a way to do this....

I workin in a place where Outlook is the widely used mail client. Mails are backed up onto a server as project documentation in the form of .msg files.

I use Thunderbird and therefore have struck diffaculty opening the backed up .msg files. Also when I have emails to back up I cannot store them as .msg files for others to read.

Is there some way/plug in that allows Thunderbird to "open/save as" emails to a .msg format? I really don't want to have to use outlook...

Any ideas would be a great help!
old SKopischke
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Joined: December 31st, 1969, 5:00 pm

Post by old SKopischke »

My recommendation, from a technology management perspective, is to use Outlook. This is only because your organization appears to make use of particular Outlook functionality not (currently?) available in Thunderbird.

Also, have you approached your organization about using Thunderbird instead of Outlook?
Old Ausdilecce
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Joined: December 31st, 1969, 5:00 pm

Post by Old Ausdilecce »

Just for your info..

Outlook's .msg format is a proprietary ( Microsoft ) format.

TB can NOT read nor write in this format.

And barring some unforseen occurrance ( like MS releasing their source code ) TB never will be able to read/write in this format..
....It's not just TB either... NO other messaging app can read/write the .msg format ( unless the app was written by Microsoft )
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tanstaafl
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Joined: July 30th, 2003, 5:06 pm

Post by tanstaafl »

There are PERL scripts you could use to convert between .msg files and the mbox files thunderbird uses. There is also an extension to let you import mbox files. However, I agree with SKopischke that it would be counter-productive.

If your organization used IMAP (not POP) you could try to convince them to store project documentation by copying the message to a public remote folder (a IMAP folder, not a file server folder). Since its still stored on the server backing it up should be a non-issue, and since its not stored as a external file it wouldn't matter whether you use Outlook or Thunderbird to access/store it.
Old Ausdilecce
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Joined: December 31st, 1969, 5:00 pm

Post by Old Ausdilecce »

tanstaafl,

I did NOT know there are perl scripts around that can 'read' .msg files...
Can you tell me where they are ?
Are they GPLd ?

I would like to see if I can add that functionality to my 'Import ' function of AttachmentTools

Cheers
Giulioski
Posts: 30
Joined: March 3rd, 2007, 2:26 am

Post by Giulioski »

I think it's very important to write such a plug-in so that 1 million people or more can make the switch from outlook to thunderbird. I have found the source code but I'm not able to make an extension.

"Script to convert outlook .msg to .eml email message"
I found an opensource perl script but unfortunatelly I'm not a perl master
perl source can be found here
http://www.avtechpulse.com/opensource/email.html

there's also a converter for windows that doesn't requires Outlook to be installed:
ABC Amber Outlook Converter (it can also batch convert, only for windows)
http://www.processtext.com/abcoutlk.html
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