This repository contains a Python 3.9+ module for reading Microsoft Outlook .msg files and converting them to .eml format, which is the standard MIME format for email messages.

This project uses compoundfiles to navigate the .msg file structure, compressed-rtf and rtfparse to unpack HTML message bodies, and html2text to back-fill plain text message bodies when only an HTML body is present.

Install the dependencies with:

pip install -r requirements.txt

(You may need to create and activate a Python virtual environment first.)

Then either convert a single file by piping:

python outlookmsgfile.py < message.msg > message.eml

Or convert a set of files:

python outlookmsgfile.py *.msg

When passing filenames as command-line arguments, a new file with .eml appended to the filename is written out with the message in MIME format.

To use it in your application

import outlookmsgfile
eml = outlookmsgfile.load('my_email_sample.msg')

The load() function returns an EmailMessage instance.