up vote 49 down vote favorite
18

I need to view a .msg file. It is an email from Microsoft Outlook. How can I do this in Ubuntu?

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similar question: askubuntu.com/questions/282691/… – DJCrashdummy Oct 14 '16 at 12:19
    
At least with Thunderbird(45.8.0)->Open File it displays somewhat readable. – math Oct 17 '17 at 8:53
up vote 27 down vote accepted

Looks like the best thing to do is to convert them to an eml file using this script:

http://www.matijs.net/software/msgconv/

It's not pretty, it's not gui based, but it'll work.

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After installing the script as indicated (cpan -i Email::Outlook::Message) found a quick way to call it: creating a "Nautilus Script" with: #!/bin/bash for arg do msgconvert "$arg" done – Pisu Sep 30 '14 at 7:28
up vote 36 down vote

Building on Martin Owens answer, this is the quick solution:

wget http://www.matijs.net/software/msgconv/msgconvert.pl
sudo apt-get install libemail-outlook-message-perl libemail-localdelivery-perl libemail-sender-perl
perl msgconvert.pl YourMessage.msg
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3  
For Ubuntu 14.04 I also needed this package: libemail-sender-perl – bmaupin Nov 13 '14 at 14:08
up vote 13 down vote

Open it with MsgViewer http://sourceforge.net/projects/msgviewer/

wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/msgviewer/files/latest/download
mv download MSGViewer.zip 
unzip MSGViewer.zip
cd MSGViewer-1.9
java -jar MSGViewer.jar

now, just drag'n'drop the msg file to the program window to have its contents displayed.

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MSGViewer is a nice program, but I found that the viewer wouldn't open an attached .PDF file within the .MSG file. It appeared to change the filename to something that it couldn't find. – Mr Ed Apr 25 '16 at 7:21
    
This works nicely. However I have some problems with the encoding of non ASCI mails (in my case Greek). Do you happen to know if there is any setting for this. – Bruni Jun 22 '16 at 16:22
up vote 10 down vote

I am on Ubuntu 15.10 and matijs'es msgconvert script seems to be available in the repos now. after running:

sudo apt-get install libemail-outlook-message-perl libemail-localdelivery-perl libemail-sender-perl

I can now now run

msgconvert *.msg

to convert the messages entirely with tools from the repos.

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up vote 3 down vote

I found after install msgconvert that msgconvert wasn't installed when I ran the command. Rather than faff about trying to debug it, I did this. Done in less than a minute. http://www.zamzar.com/convert/msg-to-pdf/

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Great, this did the job for me. – asoundmove Apr 4 '15 at 3:04
3  
it doesnt handle attachments, so it's pretty fail imo – meffect Oct 3 '15 at 7:58
    
I converted from .MSG to .EML, and the attachments come through correctly. The .EML files was openable with Thunderbird. – Mr Ed Apr 25 '16 at 7:22
up vote 0 down vote

With SeaMonkey program, Link please see below: http://www.seamonkey-project.org/

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1  
Where do you see that seamonkey is able to view those files? Add a detailed description please. – guntbert Mar 19 '15 at 14:10
    
Please install this program, after that from "File" menu choose "open file..." and choose your .msg file. – Davidgh Mar 19 '15 at 14:16
up vote -1 down vote

With Mozilla Thunderbird mail client or Evolution..

Let me know if this is usefull.

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Thanks. I voted you up. I only chose the other answer because I personally was looking for something command line. – Eric Johnson Feb 7 '11 at 1:01
4  
Thunderbird actually won't successfully read the .msg files beyond the mail header info. Once you use the msgconvert script mentioned above by Martin Owens, you can open the resulting MIME files in Thunderbird. If you save all you .msg files into a single folder and run the script with *.msg parameter, it will batch convert all the files. – N.C. Weber Feb 20 '13 at 16:14
2  
I'm afraid thunderbird can't translate the .msg file. You're somewhat lucky I have less than 125 reputation ;) – frankster Oct 29 '13 at 17:45

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