How to download IMAP email files as text/Word files?
How to download IMAP email files as text/Word files?
I have an email account on a webhost that uses SMTP/IMAP protocol. I have thousands of emails there and I want to save them as simple text or Word doc files (like .docx). It takes too much work to open each one in my browser and copy the FROM, TO, SUBJECT, and body. Right now I don't use a special app for this; I just use the web interface. If someone offers a good client that can do this, I'll install it. I looked at forums about Thunderbird and Outlook but didn't find easy answers there. A search on Google showed an article (link provided) that says you can save emails as plain text using Outlook, but other people say those saved files have too much HTML or XML in them. Does anyone know if that is true? Thanks a lot in advance.
No one reads emails in a web browser style. Emails are plain text, just like when you print them out or put them on paper. Even if they have some special code inside for making things look nice, that code goes away when you copy and paste the message into another app or save it to a file. It is totally normal because I should be able to keep it clean without any HTML tags.
The email app (Outlook) or the web browser already shows the HTML code on screen. If you click Save, you might get just the plain text of the message body along with all those HTML tags. It could be a simple string of characters. You can save these parts as separate Word documents or put them into an Access database. I've done this before.
Exactly. That is why I am saving this spot. In 2021, surely there should have been easy ways to do it using big email apps.
Got a working fix. Installed Thunderbird and the ImportExportTools NG extension. Now I can export all my files super easily.