EML file viewer

How to open an .eml file

1. Choose the .eml file, or drop it on the page. You can add up to 20 at once.
2. Read the message. The sender, recipients, date and subject are at the top, then the message itself. If it has a formatted and a plain-text version, you can switch between them. All headers shows the technical lines, such as the route the message took.
3. Save what you need: an attachment, all attachments as a .zip, the message as a PDF, or a printout.

With several files, the messages are listed newest first. Search by sender, recipient or subject, and click a subject to read it.

What is an .eml file?

An .eml file is one e-mail saved as plain text in the internet’s standard message format (RFC 5322 with MIME). The text, the formatted version and every attachment are inside the one file. Mail programs save and open it: Thunderbird, Apple Mail and Outlook among them, and Gmail’s Download message produces one. That makes .eml a common way to keep a message as a record, or to send it on as an attachment.

Apple Mail keeps each message on the Mac as an .emlx file, an .eml with a few extra lines around it. The viewer reads those too. A message Mail only partly downloaded is kept as .partial.emlx, with its attachments in separate files, so it may open here without them.

When an .eml file won’t open

• No mail program on this computer or phone. Opened in a text editor, the file is lines of code and long blocks of letters (the attachments, encoded). The viewer turns it back into the message.
• The message arrived as an attachment. Forwarded e-mails are often attached as .eml files. Their own attachments are inside them; the viewer lists them.
• It holds a winmail.dat. Messages sent from Outlook in its own rich text format carry their attachments packed in a winmail.dat file. Click Open next to it to see what it contains.
• The text is in another alphabet, or shows odd characters. The viewer reads the character set each part declares (UTF-8, Windows code pages, Japanese, Chinese and others), and falls back sensibly when a message declares it wrongly.

Saving as PDF

There are two ways, both on your device:

• Download PDF makes the PDF straight away: the subject, sender, recipients and date at the top, then the message text and the list of attachments. Long messages run over as many pages as they need. This PDF uses standard fonts, which cover English and Western European languages; other letters (Polish, Czech or Greek ones, Chinese, Arabic) and emoji print as “?”, and you are told when that happens.
• Print or save as PDF opens your browser’s print window with the message as it looks on screen, pictures included. Choose Save as PDF (or Microsoft Print to PDF on Windows) as the printer. This keeps the layout and every alphabet.

With several messages, One PDF of the messages listed puts them all in one file, each starting on a new page. Search first to include only some of them.

Private by design

Nothing is uploaded. The files are read by your browser on your device, and pictures from the web inside a message are not loaded, so the sender can’t tell the message was opened.

Outlook, Exchange and Microsoft 365 are trademarks of Microsoft; Gmail and Google Takeout of Google; Apple Mail of Apple; Thunderbird of the Mozilla Foundation. SheetConvert isn’t affiliated with any of them; the names are used only to say which files the tools open.