How to Bulk Export Outlook Email File Attachments in Windows

Our Outlook email messages contain lots of valuable information, often in the form of attached documents, photos, PDF's, text files, and anything else that people want to share by email.  This is especially true in a business environment where important files are often sent through email.  The email spigot never seems to end, however, and sometimes it would be convenient to just copy all of the attachments and save them outside of Microsoft Outlook to a folder, where we can more easily browse, sort and access the files. Unfortunately, Outlook doesn't provide a bulk file extraction capability.

MessageExport add-in by Encryptomatic LLC adds the ability to bulk export email file attachments to Microsoft Outlook, making it easily accessible in Outlook's toolbar.  

Download a 15 day free trial of MessageExport and follow along with us.

Selecting Outlook Email Messages

MessageExport inserts itself into the Outlook toolbar. It is active after you select one or more email messages in the mail list, or if you select a folder of messages.  You can select any number of Outlook email messages.  To choose them all, type Ctrol-A, or just click on the folder containing all the messages. 

This photo shows three messages highlighted messages in Outlook.  Depending on the Outlook UI you have selected, you may see something a little different in your Outlook.  To select just a few messages as I have, hold down the Control key and click on the specific messages to select them.

Bulk Exporting Outlook File Attachments

After you have selected one or more emails,  you can use the MessageExport toolbar in Outlook to convert them, or perform one of the many operations that will now be available to you.  Today, we will just process file attachments in the email messages, saving a copy of them to a folder on our desktop.

 

The MessageExport functions live in the main Outlook toolbar.  The next step is to choose the export profile you want to run. In this case we will choose "Export Attachments Only."  Click the blue "Export" button, and MessageExport will prompt you for a location to store the file attachments.

That's it! 

Whether you choose just a few emails or hundreds (even thousands), MessageExport will copy all file attachments and save them to your local drive.  To be clear: MessageExport will not remove the attachments from your emails, but a copy of the file attachments will be stored to your local drive.

If you have any questions, please post them there, or contact the MessageExport support team!

How to convert Outlook email that has been saved to your Windows hard drive as .msg files?

Recently we were contacted by a customer who asked if the MessageExport add-in for Microsoft Outlook could be used to export emails that had already been saved to a Windows desktop folder.  The emails were saved as Outlook .msg files, which are individual email messages that contain all of the original email metadata and file attachments.

The MessageExport add-on functions from within Microsoft Outlook. It is designed to enhance Outlook's abilities to export email.  With MessageExport you can save Outlook emails to numerous file formats: pdf, mbox, eml, jpg, csv, and yes, even .msg format.

After those emails have been saved by MessageExport to your hard drive, what else can MessageExport do with them?  Nothing, actually. MessageExport wasn't designed to work independently of Outlook. Being tightly integrated with Microsoft Outlook gives MessageExport powerful advantages, such as being able to take advantage of Outlook rules and search.  But it can't further manipulate the email messages that it has saved outside of Outlook. It just wasn't designed to do that.

But all hope is not lost.

One way to solve the issue of managing email-formatted content outside of Outlook would be to use an email viewer.   Encryptomatic LLC, the developers of MessageExport, also develop PstViewer Pro. It's an email viewer that does not require Microsoft Outlook. PstViewer Pro performs many of the same functions of MessageExport, but it works entirely from outside of Outlook.  Pst Viewer Pro can read Outlook .pst or .ost files. It can also search and convert .msg and .eml email messages.

Pst Viewer software manages Outlook .pst and .msg files

Using PstViewer Pro, our customer could locate the folder containing his .msg emails.  Whether he had just a few, or thousands of them, Pst Viewer Pro would read them individually and organize them into a mail list.   .Msg files can then be sorted and searched using PstViewer Pro's advanced search feature.

Advanced search helps locate important .msg files

 .Msg emails can also be converted to different formats with PST Viewer Pro.  Select the target format from the drop down list, and click the export button. PST Viewer Pro can convert .msg files into .eml, mbox, csv, pdf, and other formats.

If we wanted to convert .msg files into a comma separated values (csv) format, we would first select the messages from the mail list. Then, choose the target format, CSV, from the drop down list. Lastly, click the yellow export button, as shown in the image below.

Convert .msg files to different formats

While MessageExport is an excellent tool for saving email outside of Microsoft Outlook, it was not intended for managing email outside of Outlook. If you have this need, download a free trial of PST Viewer Pro and try it for 15 days. 

MessageExport add-in for Outlook is updated.

An update for MessageExport is available. Download version 4.0 through the in-software upgrade service, or from https://www.encryptomatic.com/messageexport/

This release delivers tested compatibility for Microsoft Oulook 2016. It has an updated help menu system and include fixes for various  customer contributed issues.

MessageExport add-in for Microsoft ‪#‎Outlook‬ is the premier tool for exporting, converting and copying Outlook ‪#‎email‬ messages to ‪#‎PDF‬ and many other formats. Convert emails in bulk, individually, or automate the email export process.