gromox-oxm2mt(8)

📦
version 3.6 · 2 versions
, in alpine 3.24

💌 gromox-oxm2mt — bestie's guide to snooping on Outlook .msg files

okay so real talk, this is the gromox-oxm2mt page from the Gromox admin reference, and it's honestly iconic. it's a little utility that cracks open Outlook .msg files and shows you what's inside. come sit with me, i'll walk you through it 💅

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

gromox-oxm2mt [-pt] input.msg

that's it. one input file, a couple of optional flags, we're vibing 🦋

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

gromox-oxm2mt reads an Outlook .msg file and re-exports all that data in a Gromox-specific mailbox transfer format, straight to stdout (standard output, bestie, like a main character printing to the terminal ✨). the whole point is that you can pipe it directly into the gromox-import(8) program and it'll just eat it up. no cap.

and if you want, oxm2mt can also print a tree summary of the message — like a little map of everything inside. lowkey the best part tbh 🎀

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • --decap=n — this one's kinda wild: it picks attachment number n's embedded message and treats that as the "top-level" message, then throws away the rest of the outer message. so you're decapitating the file and keeping only the inner one 💀 heads up: n is 1-based (so the first attachment is 1, not 0, we don't do that here).
  • -p — show properties in detail. this one enhances -t, so it's like -t but with extra lore 👑
  • -t — show a diagnostic tree view of the source data while it's being read. it's giving "watching the file get unpacked in real time" 🌈
  • --loglevel n — sets the maximum verbosity for general logging. fyi this is not connected to -p, -t, or -v, so don't get it twisted 🙈. the levels are: 1=crit, 2=error, 3=warn, 4=notice, 5=info, 6=debug.
    • Default: 4 (notice) — so it's already chatty but not too chatty, yk? 💖

🧚 EXAMPLES 🧚

importing a message into drafts, slay:

gromox-oxm2mt saved.msg | gromox-import -u user@domain.example -B drafts

see how it's piped straight in? the way that | just hands it off... obsessed 🫶

📚 NORMATIVE REFERENCES 📚

  • MS-CFB: Compound File Binary Format (CFBF)
  • MS-OXMSG: Outlook Item (.msg) File Format

okay so here's the lore 🍓: Outlook message files use the "Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) / Component Object Model (COM) structured storage compound file implementation binary file format" — try saying that five times fast 😭 — or CFB/CFBF for short. it kinda resembles a FAT filesystem, which is a vibe. the file(1) utility identifies these bad boys as "CDFV2 Microsoft Outlook Message" (Compound Document Format). and a proposed MIME type for them is "application/vnd.ms-outlook" ✨

oxm2mt uses the libolecf C library to read the CDF structure of .msg files per [MS-CFB], and then applies its own code to make sense of the files as per [MS-OXMSG]. literally does the reading and the interpreting, no shortcuts 💜

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

go read those next, iykyk 💖

ngl this whole page is basically "here's how to peek inside an Outlook file and yeet it into Gromox" — go forth and import, bestie 🌸

and that's a wrap, babe 🎀 this was the gromox-oxm2mt(8) page from Gromox — mwah, see you in the next manpage 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from