Without Outlook with Mail Opener
This opens a sample .msg whose only body is compressed RTF, the way Outlook often saves HTML mail. The tool unpacks the RTF, finds the HTML Outlook kept inside it and shows the list and the accented text as they were sent. Open your own .msg to read it the same way.
- Tap Open your email file, or drop the .msg onto the page on a computer.
- The header shows subject, sender, recipients and date in your time zone.
- The body appears below: HTML when the file has it, HTML recovered from the RTF body, or plain text, labelled as such.
- Save or share each attachment from the list.
What to know
A .msg can hold the body three ways: plain text, HTML, and compressed RTF. Many viewers read only the plain text, so tables, lists and links disappear. When Outlook received an HTML email it often keeps it as RTF with the HTML wrapped inside (the RTF says \fromhtml1). Mail Opener decompresses that RTF (the LZFu format), lifts the original HTML back out and shows it.
When the RTF holds no HTML, for example a message typed in Outlook's rich-text editor, the page shows the text it can read from the RTF and says it is shown as plain text. Pictures embedded in RTF are not drawn in that case. Older Outlook files that store text in a regional code page, such as Japanese Shift-JIS or Cyrillic Windows-1251, are decoded with that code page rather than shown as broken characters.
Updated · Cosmovex
Questions
Why do some .msg viewers show the email without formatting?
They read only the plain-text copy of the body. Outlook often keeps the formatted version only as compressed RTF, which has to be unpacked and, for HTML mail, unwrapped.
Is this the same as opening it in Outlook?
It shows the email and its attachments. Outlook-only features such as voting buttons, meeting responses or follow-up flags are not acted on; their values appear in the raw properties view in Pro.
Can it open a .msg saved from new Outlook or Outlook on the web?
Yes, those are the same .msg format. Calendar items and contacts saved as .msg open too; their body and attachments are shown, not the calendar fields.
Is my email uploaded anywhere?
No. The file is read by the page in your browser. The only request to us is a count for the free daily limit, which carries a random ID for this browser and the kind of file, never the email, its subject, its sender or its attachments.
The free plan covers everything on this page. Mail Opener Pro ($9.50 until Oct 25, then $19, paid once) is described on the Mail Opener page.
