Learn How to Use MessageExport for Outlook in One Minute

MessageExport for Microsoft Outlook is an add-in that helps you do more with your email messages. Use MessageExport to export, convert, copy and save Outlook emails to different formats, either manually or automatically.  This very short tutorial will get you up and running with MessageExport in about a minute.

 

Download a free 15 day trial of MessageExport and follow along!

How to Copy All Outlook Email Attachments to Your Hard Drive

Your Microsoft Outlook emails contain a wealth of business and personal information.  Sometimes its just easier when some of that information is saved to your hard drive. 

It may make sense to remove file attachments from emails and save them outside of Outlook. As stand-alone documents, they can be more easily utilized when removed from the context of an email.

MessaegExport is an add-in for Outlook 365/2019 that adds many new features to Outlook. With MessageExport, Outlook can save and extract emails and file attachments in ways that can save you time.

One day a MessageExport user contacted us for assistance. Her boss was involved in a law suite and now needed all of the file attachments that a client had sent her over the past five years. There were thousands of emails over that time period.  Using MessageExport, she was able to automatically extract all of the file attachments in those emails and save them to a hard drive folder.

Manually reviewing and copying file attachments from such a large quantity of Outlook emails would have taken her hours, perhaps days. MessageExport performed the task in less than 10 minutes.

Download a free trial of MessageExport, and let us help you determine if our software is a good fit for your project or workflow.

We Have Updated OutDisk FTP Add-in for Microsoft Outlook

File Transfer Protocol, or #FTP, is a venerable old protocol with a legacy stretching as far back as 1971, when Abhay Bhushan wrote the spec for it.  With concerns slowly mounting about security over the years, FTP has given way to other file transport methods that securely handle passwords and encrypt transfers.

We originally released OutDisk FTP in 2006, and over the years it has not been one of our more successful products. The complexity of configuring FTP accounts and servers was a hurdle for some. Given the amount of time our support team spent troubleshooting our customer's person FTP servers, we learned firsthand that OutDisk is a niche tool that is not right for everyone. In fact, most people should use an file transfer add-in from a service like Dropbox, and not try to roll their own service.

Yet, our more hardcore OutDisk users (generally more technically capable with solid IT experience) have found ways to solve an array of problems with it, many of which we never envisioned.  At their urging we have updated OutDisk for Outlook 2019.  The emphasis of OutDisk moving forward will be on use of the SFTP Secure File Transport Protocol which adds encryption layer providing security far beyond old FTP.

If you are one of the persistent hardcore OutDisk users who wouldn't take "maybe" as answer, this update is for you.

What is OutDisk SFTP for Outlook?

It's been awhile, so we may as well start at the beginning.

OutDisk SFTP is a tool for transferring files from your Windows desktop to your remote server.  It can be used from the Windows desktop, but most people who choose OutDisk do so because of it's tight integration with the Microsoft Office Outlook interface.

When you send an Outlook email with file attachments, OutDisk SFTP Outlook add-in will, either automatically or by your manual selection,  remove the attachments from the email and upload them to your server. It then inserts your custom message and a https link into the email so the recipient can download the attachments.

The benefit of using OutDisk is that it makes your emails smaller and more likely to be delivered to the recipient's inbox.  You can also choose to automatically compress and encrypt the file attachments.

People who use OutDisk are generally in a small to mid-sized company, although we have had large electrical utilities use it.  What they all seem to have in common is a) they want to simplify sending attachments for their Outlook users, b) they don't want their users uploading company documents to their private Dropbox account or some other 3rd party file storage system, and c)  maybe they want to take some load off of email servers and storage, or have a legal need to keep control of documents, or have some kind of other specific use that had them searching Google for an FTP add-in for Outlook.

Here's some pictures of the OutDisk SFTP integration with Outlook.

How does OutDisk SFTP work from the user's perspective?

After setting up your SFTP server, and installing OutDisk SFTP with their log-in credentials, your users should find it simple to use.  They just create an Outlook email as they normally would, attach a file to the email and send it (as they normally would).

Here's an email with an EXE file attachment that I prepared to send to myself:

Email with exe file attachment.See the OutDisk tool bar integration upper right corner.

Here's the normal message from Outlook reminding me that I can do that.

Outlook warning about potentially unsafe file attachments.

And now, here's the email as it arrived in my Gmail Inbox.

Finally, here's the https webpage the recipient sees when they follow the link.  And yes, you can change the text that OutDisk inserts into the email. It's fully customizable.

OutDisk SFTP download landing page

Yes, you can change the logo to your company logo.
We have provided a test SFTP service in OutDisk, just so you can try it right away.  File size is limited, and we sweep through and delete everything quite often, so please do not use it in production.

In Conclusion

We are very pleased that we can keep OutDisk compatible with the current versions of Microsoft Windows and Office.  If you think you might be a candidate to use Outdisk, or if it may be a fit for a project you're working on,  you can learn more and get the free trial at the OutDisk product home page.

By the way, those are my real email addresses. I love to hear from customers. Drop me a line and say hello.

Print New Outlook Emails Automatically

Despite the digital revolution, many offices still run on paper.  Some office processes may find it necessary to print email messages on paper.  Microsoft Office Outlook users can manually print an email message by selecting it and then choosing File > Print.

While Outlook's basic print capabilities are fine for most people, what if you need to print hundreds of emails daily?  Let MessageExport add-in for Outlook by Encryptomatic LLC automate the  printing of your emails and save you time and money.

MessageExport adds new capabilities to Outlook for printing and converting email.  This article will show you how to setup an export profile that will automatically send new Outlook messages to your printer.

MessageExport Toolbar in Microsoft Outlook

How to use MessageExport in Outlook

MessageExport is easy to use. First select the messages you want to convert or print from Outlook's mail list. Next, choose the target format from the MessageExport drop down list.

Note that these items in  the drop down list are called "Export Profiles." You can build new export profiles, or edit the profiles that come standard with MessageExport. We'll talk more about that in a minute.

Finally, click "Export" to start the printing or converting job. This is most basic way to use MessageExport.

Beneath the veneer of MessageExport are other features that you can use to design more complex operations. Lets look now at how we can tell MessageExport to print incoming emails automatically. To do this, we will change some of the settigs for the "Export to Printer" profile.

With "Export to Printer" displayed in the MessageExport toolbar, click the tool icon to edit this profile.

Click the Tools icon to edit the "Export to Printer" profile.

The Settings page for the "Export to Printer" profile opens.

Print Outlook emails as they arrive with MessageExport

Click OK, and now MessageExport will begin printing incoming messages as Outlook receives them.

There are many additional ways to use MessageExport.  For example, if you only want to print new emails to specific folders, change to "Export from" list to "Predefined Folders."

Selecting Outlook folders for printing emails in MessageExport add-in.

You could also use Microsoft Outlook's rules to set specific criteria for moving emails to a select folder, and then have MessageExport automatically print any emails to that folder.

Another useful feature is MessageExport's profile scheduler. Use the scheduler if you prefer to print emails periodically, such as every six hours.

Printing Outlook emails on a schedule

For people who work intensely with Microsoft Outlook and email, MessageExport adds powerful new capabilities to automate work and save time.

Learn more about MessageExport and download a free 15 day trial.

How to Bulk Convert Outlook Emails to .MBOX format.

MBOX is a useful open document format for containing email messages. It is commonly used in email clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird.  Microsoft Outlook shunned MBOX for a proprietary database file known as .PST, or personal storage tables, and does not support exporting email to MBOX.

This oversight has been addressed by developers at Encryptomatic LLC with the introduction of MessageExport, a Microsoft Outlook add-in that integrates powerful export extensions to the Outlook toolbar.  MessageExport is compatible with Windows versions of Outlook, from Outlook 2016 through 2007.

Convert Outlook Email to MBOX with MessageExport add-in.

Bulk Converting Outlook Email to MBOX

Step 1.  Download and install the MessageExport add-in and restart Outlook.
MessageExport is available as a 15 day free trial.   After installing, it will integrate with the Outlook menu system.  In Outlook 2016 you will find it in a tab called "MessageExport."

Step 2.  Choose the "Export to MBOX" profile.
From the MessageExport dropdown list select "export to mbox."  In addition to MBOX, there are other formats you can convert email to, including PDF, CSV, DOCx, and many others. The export profile displayed in the list is the active conversion format.

Step 3.  Select Emails from the Outlook Mail list
Highlight one or more emails in the Outlook mail list.  To select all emails, type "Control-A."
You can also highlight a folder if you want to export all email in that folder to MBOX.  Any email message that is highlighted will be converted to MBOX when we start the operation.

Step 4.  Click MessageExport's "Export" button to start the operation.
Please note that the trial version of MessageExport is limited to converting 50 emails in a single export operation.  This restriction is removed after registration and you will be able to convery any number of emails to an MBOX file.

Select the Windows folder where MessageExport will save your MBOX file.

When the operation is complete, you will find a MBOX file containing your emails in the location you specified.

We hope this article has been useful in showing you how to take your email from Outlook to MBOX. If you have any follow up questions, please post them below. We'll be glad to help.

Converting Email with Microsoft Outlook 2013 Rules and MessageExport Add-On.

The MessageExport Add-in for Microsoft Outlook by Encryptomatic LLC extends Outlook's ability to convert, export and copy email messages automatically.  Our article today looks at various ways that you can use Microsoft Outlook Rules and MessageExport together to perform a complex email processing operation.

While MessageExport will address the needs of most people right out of the box, sometimes custom solutions need to be created. MessageExport does not integrate directly to Outlook rules, but using them together provides a vast range of possibilities for email processing.

We're often surprised at how people use MessageExport. It was designed to give users a wide range of options to design custom solutions to their email content management challeges. We love hearing about the creative ways that people use MessageExport and the real-life issues our software helps people solve.

Today we are designing a solution that will result in email messages received in Outlook, from a specific client domain, being converted into a PDF file, copied to a specific folder, and then the original email message in Outlook will be deleted.

Let's break down our project. The steps in involved in this project include:
1. Creating an Outlook rule to collect messages from the client's email domain into an Outlook folder
2. Creating a custom MessageExport profile that will perform these 3 functions:

a. Convert new messages added to a folder into PDF files
b. Delete the messages after they have been converted
c. Perform this operation again in xx minutes.

This is a two part article. This first portion will focus on setting up the Outlook 2013 rule that will accomplish step 1, above. The second part of this article will focus on step 2, setting up MessageExport.

Getting Started

This article assumes that you have Outlook 2013 and the MessageExport add-in for Outlook installed. The steps will be similar for earlier versions of Outlook, but there will be some differences in the location of the rules menu.

The first thing we'll want to do is to create a new folder in Outlook where we will copy email messages that we want to convert into PDF files.

First decide where to place your new folder in your Outlook tree structure. I've decided to create a new folder called "Emails to PDF" beneath my Inbox. To do this I right click on Inbox, select New Folder, and apply my name, and press Enter.

Create a new email folder in Outlook 2013

Now that we have our folder, lets setup an Outlook Rule to toss emails in there.

Setting up Outlook Rules

In Outlook 2013, Microsoft Outlook's rules can be accessed by going to File > Outlook Rules &  Alerts.

Outlook 2013 Rules & Alerts

Click on Rules and Alerts, and a window will open. To create a new Outlook rule, click New Rule.

Click 'New Rule' to create an Outlook rule.

 This will being up a new window. Find "Start from a blank rule" and choose "Apply rule on messages I recieve." Click "Next" to continue.

The following image has quite a bit going on. It is not as difficult as it looks, I promise. I indicated the different areas where you will need to make a selection.

In Step 1, mark the line "with specific words in the recipient's address.

In Step 2, click "specific words."  This will open another window called Search Text.  Enter your client's domain name into this field and click "Add."

Outlook Rules Wizard, Steps 1 and 2.

When you're done, click "OK" to close the Search Text box, and then "Next" in the Rules Wizard.

The Rules Wizard will advance to the next page.  Since we want to move emails from our client to a specific folder, check the box next to "move it to the specified folder."  In Step 2, you'll need to specify the client's domain name. In my example, any email from the domain Megacompany.biz (my client) will be copied to a folder that I specify.  Entering the domain name (not the entire email address) will include all email received from your client. 

Now lets specify the folder where all email from the client will be copied to. Click the word "specified" to open up a second window where you'll choose the folder you created earlier. I selected my folder "Email to PDF."

Move email to the specified folder

Click ok to close out.

Congratulations! You've just created a Windows Rule to copy all email received from your client into your selected folder.

Click through to part 2 of this article, and we'll show you how to setup the MessageExport add-in for Microsoft Outlook to process the email folder we just created, converting email messages to PDF, and then deleting the messages.

Outlook to EML: Extracting Outlook email messages to RFC-822 .eml format

Files with the .EML extension are individual email message formatted to be compliant with the RFC-822 specification. EML files contain the email messages, file attachments, html code, and even internet header information. As an open standard, EML files are accessible to virtually every email client.  Because its an open non-proprietary standard (unlike the .MSG format which is Microsoft's proprietary equivalent) EML files are often used to archive email messages.

Archiving Microsoft Outlook email as .eml files is not possible without specialized software. MessageExport is an add-in that adds EML export to the Outlook toolbar. Being tightly integrated with Outlook makes it quite simple to use. Below is a video that explains the process.

Basically all that is required is to select the email message within Outlook. A message is selected when it is highlighted.

MessageExport lets you select individual files, a range of files, or you can select and export an Outlook email folder and sub-folders. The next step is to choose "Export to EML" from MessageExport's drop down list.  Lastly, click the blue Export button.

Outlook toolbar for extracting email to .eml format

MessageExport is capable of extracting one, hundreds or even thousands of email messages from Outlook. In addition to .eml format, you also choose .pdf, .msg, .gif, .tif, .csv, .mbox, and other file formats.

MessageExport is a very useful tool for extracting Outlook email messages to .eml and other formats. If your work requires that you file or format email messages, then you'll find MessageExport to be a huge time saver.  Download a free 15 day trial of MessageExport.