Open a .msg or winmail.dat file without Outlook SATCHEL

What these two files are

A .msg is what Outlook writes when an email is dragged out of it onto the desktop, or attached to another email. It is not text: it is the same kind of container as an old Word .doc, a small file system with the message's properties stored as separate streams inside it, and another whole .msg inside any attachment that is itself an email. Only Outlook opens one, which is a problem for anybody on a Mac, a phone, Gmail or Thunderbird who has been sent one.

winmail.dat arrives instead of the attachments you were expecting, when the sender's Outlook used its own rich-text format for a recipient that does not understand it. The real attachments, and usually the formatted body, are packed inside it. Nothing is wrong with the email; it just needs unpacking.

Why not an upload site

The usual answer to both is a website that converts the file on its server. That is the whole email, its attachments, the names and addresses of everyone on it, and very often the full internet headers that record which servers and addresses it passed through, handed to a company you know nothing about. SATCHEL reads both formats in this tab. The compressed rich text Outlook often stores the body in is decompressed here too, and when it is Outlook's wrapping of an HTML email the original HTML is recovered.

What it shows, and what it does not do

• The message, with sender, recipients, dates and the body as it was formatted, in the same sealed frame POSTBAG and CABINET use. Pictures sent inside the email are shown; pictures on the internet are not fetched, because a picture loading is how a sender learns an email was opened.
• A folder of them at once. Drop as many .msg files as you have and they are listed, searched (the text inside them too, if you ask), sorted and read one after another with j and k. They save together as one .mbox, as a .zip of .eml files, or as a .zip of every attachment in them.
• Contacts and meetings. A contact, meeting or task dragged out of Outlook is a .msg too. It is shown as one and saves as a vCard (.vcf) or iCalendar (.ics), a repeating meeting as one meeting that repeats in its own time zone; Add to Contacts and Add to Calendar take it into the Workspace’s own Contacts and Calendar.
• Every attachment, each one savable, all of them in one .zip, a picture shown in place, a PDF or an Office file opened in the Workspace, and an email attached to the email opened in place.
• An .eml of the whole thing, with the attachments, which Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Gmail’s importers and Outlook itself all open. When the .msg kept the headers it arrived with, the .eml keeps them too, and they can be read and copied here.
• A warning on attachments that run code when opened, on a program dressed up with a document’s name, and on a file that fails its own checksums.

It does not open encrypted or signed Outlook messages (S/MIME), which need the recipient’s key, and it does not run anything in the email. To check where an email really came from, copy its headers into HEADERPROOF, or open the .eml in MAILBOX. For a link in it you are unsure of, PHISHLENS reads it without visiting it.