What method is used to convert IMAP email files into text or Word documents?
What method is used to convert IMAP email files into text or Word documents?
I have an email account on a webhost that uses SMTP/IMAP protocol. I need to save thousands of emails as regular text or Word documents. Manually copying the FROM, TO, SUBJECT: and body into a web browser is too time-consuming. I don’t currently use a client; I’m using a web interface but will install one if it helps.
I’ve checked discussion forums for Thunderbird and Outlook, where people ask similar questions but struggle to find clear solutions.
A web search revealed an article at (https://www.lifewire.com/save-emails-as-...ok-1173728), but some users reported the files end up cluttered with HTML or XML.
Thanks in advance.
If there is HTML in the Body, and it appears quite frequently, saving it as a text file will include those HTML tags.
There's no HTML in email I read on the screen. It should be like a web browser - sure, there's embedded HTML to format the web page but if you save the text of a web page to a text document, or copy and paste it into something else the HTML is stripped off. There's no reason an email message should be any different. If I copy and paste an email message into some other document the HTML doesn't come along, so I should be able to export or save it the same way - sans HTML.
The email client (Outlook) or browser is already displaying the HTML. Saving the source for To/From/Body might just contain plain ASCII text, meaning all HTML/XML tags are removed. This could happen when using a complex sequence like Outlook → Access → Word, which could then save the content as separate Word files or rows in an Access database. I've experienced this before.
Absolutely. It's clear we're aiming to preserve this information.