A client sent me a batch of e-mail messages with attachments as part of collecting material for a study. Those e-mail messages were sent as attachments themselves, as MSG files. This is an Outlook format that can’t easily be opened by other mail clients, not even with Outlook for Mac online discussions suggest. To get at the attachments hidden in those MSG formatted files I looked for a tool to help out.

I found two, where for each I needed the paid version to get at the attachments. One was about a quarter of the costs of the other. So I opted for MSG Viewer Pro, and not MSG Viewer for Outlook. There are a number of online tools, but I don’t want to risk client information that way. There are also one or more open source tools freely available, but it was not immediately obvious I could access and save attachments contained in those MSG files with them. In the end I was glad I opted for the cheapest option, as it turned none of the attachments sent were relevant to my current work.