MSGCONVERT(1p)

📦 version 0.921, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💅 MSGCONVERT — the msgconvert manual page, bestie edition ✨

okay so. this is msgconvert, and it lives in the User Contributed Perl Documentation section of the manual (section 1p, iykyk). if you've ever been trapped with a .msg file from Outlook and no idea what to do, bestie, this page is your roman empire. let's go 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

msgconvert — turns Outlook .msg files into mbox format. that's it, that's the whole vibe. 🔥

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

here's the shape of it:

msgconvert [options] <file.msg>...

msgconvert --outfile <outfile> <file.msg>

  Options:
    --mbox <file>      deliver messages to mbox file <file>
    --outfile <oufile> write message to <outfile> or - for STDOUT
    --verbose          be verbose
    --help             help message

(yes, <oufile> — we keep the original spelling exactly, no cap, we don't fix what we didn't break 💀)

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

  • --mbox — delivers everything to the mbox file you name, instead of making a whole lil squad of individual .eml files. one big pile, very demure.
  • --outfile — writes the message straight into the outfile instead of individual .eml files. wanna send it to STDOUT? use - as the outfile. ⚠️ but no — you literally cannot use this option together with multiple <file.msg> instances. one message, one outfile. that's the rule. 🙈
  • --verbose — makes it chatty and tells you about the parts of the .msg file it skipped. very "tell me everything" energy. 💬
  • --help — prints a brief help message. a little snack of info. 🍓

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so what does this thing actually do?? it converts the messages chilling inside your Microsoft Outlook files, the <file.msg>... ones, into message/rfc822 files with the .eml extension. slay. ✨

OR — if you brought the --mbox option along — all the messages get dumped into the mbox file you gave it instead. group chat move. 💖

heads up though: this program will complain about unrecognized OLE parts in the input files, and it complains on stderr, so watch for that. it's not being mean, it's just honest. 😭

💀 BUGS 💀

okay bestie, sit down, we gotta talk about the flaws. not me exposing my own faves but here we are:

  • the program will not check whether output files already exist. it simply does not care. 💅
  • also, if you feed it "foo.MSG" and "foo.msg", you'll end up with one "foo.eml", containing one of the messages. one of them!! the other one is just gone, lost to the void. 🌈
  • not all data that's in the .MSG file is converted. there simply are some parts whose meaning escapes the author. one of these must contain the date the message was sent, for example. so like… yeah, the date might just not be there. 😭
  • formatting of text messages will also be lost. the vibes? not preserved. YMMV. 🧚

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Matijs van Zuijlen, "matijs@matijs.net" — iconic, we stan. 🌟

Copyright 2002--2020 by Matijs van Zuijlen

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

and that's the whole page, bestie. no notes, we ate 💅✨

this page comes from perl v5.32.1 and it was dated 2022-01-28 — so when you're done converting your .msg files, that's the version and date to thank. mwah 🫶🎀

📦 where this page comes from