On Fri, 08 Nov 2013 15:13:28 +0000 steve-ALUG@hst.me.uk allegedly wrote:
On 08/11/13 14:49, mick wrote:
Hi guys
I have been given a large stash of (email I believe) files with the extension .eml. I think these were created with outlook or outlook express. I have no MS software.
The files appear to be text/XML but reading them with a text editor is difficult in many cases.
Does anyone know of a linux based application I can use to make this task any easier.
Hi, they are email, and as Mark said, Thunderbird can read them. I don't think they're XML, but they will be the bare bones of the emails: Headers & associated text. Perhaps HTML for HTML emails If you're unlucky you may get some "rich text" and you may get some files encoded as a mime attachment. You won't get very far with attachments in a plain text editor. Thunderbird will open .eml files. If you drag and drop into TBird, it will add them to whichever folder you have opened. I dunno if it will do many at a time, but you could create a folder and import them into it. File/Open works well - it doesn't seem to copy the email into a folder, it just displays it. There's a possibility that Tools/Import will help.
I guess the question is, what do you want to do with them?
If you want to decode the attachments, ISTR that there's an app for that, to strip/extract/decode mime attachments from txt/eml files, but I can't remember what it is.
Steve
You are a star. Drag and drop into a new Tbird folder is working (slowly). That means I can read through the emails much more quickly when it finishes.
All I need to do is read the damned things to see if there is anything important there. They were discovered as "deleted" emails by someone else who has taken on a "corporate" machine previously used by someone who has now left. They just wanted some help in reading through them all as a check. Most are really old and it looks as if we can ignore them.
Cheers
Mick
(Tbird is more flexible than I thought)
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Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net
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