Filed under: Utilities, Macintosh, Office, Productivity, Apple, Microsoft
MailRaider - open Outlook .msg files on your Mac
by Jason Clarke Sep 17th 2009 at 9:00AM
One of the more frustrating things I found when moving from Windows to a Mac in a business environment was receiving email messages that contained other messages as attachments. This is a fairly common thing for Outlook users to do, and it doesn't usually cause problems because Outlook can happily open those messages. It's not very good email etiquette and you should avoided doing it if possible (forwarding the message makes it possible for the receiver's email program to index and search the contents), but there are times when it makes sense -- such as when forwarding a batch of messages at once.
The problem is that the Mail app that comes with all Macs unfortunately isn't capable of opening Outlook's .msg files. If you use a Mac and regularly receive messages from Outlook users, it's likely you've run into this problem at some point.
45RPM Software created MailRaider to solve just this problem. It's a free app that does one thing, and one thing well: makes .msg files created with Microsoft Outlook viewable on a Mac, including any included attachments. Formatting may be lost, but typically that's not a huge issue.
One interesting aspect of MailRaider is that the developer has pulled out the code that he uses to read the mail messages, and has turned it into a framework he calls MOLE. MOLE is a free framework for developers to use that need to read Microsoft OLE documents on a Mac.
There are other ways to read Outlook messages on a Mac, but MailRaider's price (free) and simplicity are definitely compelling.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
PC-VIP said 10:33AM on 9-17-2009
Interesting Interoperability point, but . . .
there's an even bigger problem with .MSG files: sometimes Google Desktop chokes on them, and unless you know this then when suddenly your Windows coputer can't open them you have no way to know that the fix is to uninstall Google (umm . . . which you didn't want to do, anyway).
What we need is a standard file format for attachments. Do I hear any suggestions?
Jeff Yablon
President & CEO
Answer Guy and Virtual VIP Computer Care, Business Coaching and Virtual Assistant Services
Reply
Carson said 2:22PM on 9-17-2009
In case you're not being sarcastic, there is already a standard, that every sane mail client uses. Forwarding messages as attachments is just fine, and any decent mail client will display them with no problems. Don't say "messages as attachments are bad" just because Outlook is broken and stupid. Messages as attachments preserve the full headers of the original message, which is frequently desirable.
Jeff Yablon said 2:38PM on 9-17-2009
Carson, I wasn't being sarcastic at all.
I might not have explained myself well enough, though: When you save an Outlook Message as a file (with or without its attachments), there's a new file created (the .MSG format) that is sometimes inexplicably (see my previous comment though) troublesome.
So: Outlook (yes, a pig of a product) creates a file format that is about as non-standard as it can be, and MacMail handles saved messages differently, as does Thunderbird, etc.
Wouldn't it be great if they all just saved off, oh, I dunno, .ZIP files, or .XML, or something standard?
Jeff Yablon
President & CEO
Answer Guy and Virtual VIP Computer Care, Business Coaching and Virtual Assistant Services
Jeff Yablon said 2:36PM on 9-17-2009
Carson, I wasn't being sarcastic at all.
I might not have explained myself well enough, though: When you save an Outlook Message as a file (with or without its attachments), there's a new file created (the .MSG format) that is sometimes inexplicably (see my previous comment though) troublesome.
So: Outlook (yes, a pig of a product) creates a file format that is about as non-standard as it can be, and MacMail handles saved messages differently, as does Thunderbird, etc.
Wouldn't it be great if they all just saved off, oh, I dunno, .ZIP files, or .XML, or something standard?
Jeff Yablon
President & CEO
Answer Guy and Virtual VIP Computer Care, Business Coaching and Virtual Assistant Services
PC-VIP said 2:37PM on 9-17-2009
Carson, I wasn't being sarcastic at all.
I might not have explained myself well enough, though: When you save an Outlook Message as a file (with or without its attachments), there's a new file created (the .MSG format) that is sometimes inexplicably (see my previous comment though) troublesome.
So: Outlook (yes, a pig of a product) creates a file format that is about as non-standard as it can be, and MacMail handles saved messages differently, as does Thunderbird, etc.
Wouldn't it be great if they all just saved off, oh, I dunno, .ZIP files, or .XML, or something standard?
Jeff Yablon
President & CEO
Answer Guy and Virtual VIP Computer Care, Business Coaching and Virtual Assistant Services
Reply
PC-VIP said 2:39PM on 9-17-2009
YIKES! Sorry . . . technology snafu x3 above
Reply