Open a .msg file without Outlook

When you’d need this

A .msg file is one email saved by Microsoft Outlook. On a Windows PC with the classic Outlook installed, double-clicking it opens it in Outlook. Without Outlook, Windows doesn’t know what to do with it: maybe you use Gmail or Thunderbird, your work laptop has a different setup, you’re on Linux, or someone at a client sent you a .msg file and you just need the PDF inside.

How to open it

1. Drag the .msg file onto this page, or press Choose a file.
2. The email shows the subject, who sent it and to whom, the date, and the message, with its formatting.
3. Attachments are listed with a Save button each. Emails attached inside the email can be opened too.

It’s all done in the browser on your computer, in Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari, with nothing to install. The file isn’t uploaded anywhere.

What it shows

• The formatted message, or the plain text if you prefer it (there’s a switch).
• The sender, the To, Cc and Bcc lists when the file includes them, and the date in your own time zone.
• Pictures that were part of the email, such as logos and screenshots.
• The technical headers, for checking where an email really came from.
• Calendar items, contacts and notes saved from Outlook are shown with the text they contain.

Pictures from the internet stay off

Marketing emails and some scams use remote pictures to find out when you open a message. They’re held back until you choose to show them. Pictures carried inside the email itself are shown straight away.

Old and odd .msg files

Files saved by Outlook 97 onwards work, in both the older “ANSI” style and the Unicode style newer Outlook versions use, including messages in Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and other scripts. If a file is damaged or was saved part-way, the page tells you instead of showing a blank page. A file that is really a Word document or something else renamed to .msg is recognised and named.