I am trying to save some emails as text files to store outside of eM Client.
I was surprised to see that the only “save as” options are .EML and PDF.
EML and PDF can be converted to text but it’s not simple and the result leaves a lot to be desired, requiring reformatting, etc.
Is there some way to save an email as a simple text file?
You can allways copy and paste the email into a .txt file manually other than converting it, but the normal export process for most mail clients is .eml or .pdf as keeps the formatting correct and can be then opened in any mail clients easily.
I’m not sure what you are trying to do. If you just want to save an occasional email as text, then @cyberzork’s option is fine. Just copy and paste into notepad or whatever text editor you use.
If you are trying to maintain an archive of old emails in a format independent of what is used by emClient (or thunderbird etc.) and maintain all attachments, and be searchable so it is actually useful as an archive storage system, then the free Mailstore Home should work fine. Just export as eml and import into Mailstore.
You’ll need to move emails to an archived folder, so you are only exporting once, as you don’t get date/time options on export that I’ve been able to see.
You don’t need to import the messages anywhere. Just save them as eml, which is the universal message standard. Most applications can open them without having to import them.
When you export messages, they are saved using the date and subject for the file name. If you export multiple folders at one time, the folder structure is also kept.
If you mean choosing which messages to export based on date or time, you can just do a search, then export the search result messages.
Will that work as a real archive? By that I mean, will you be able to find anything among say, 20,000 emails with attachments that might be needed in a court case? If so, then you are right, there is no need to import them into a program that can filter and sort and find everything along with the attachments which are indexed for almost immediate retrieval by an excellent indexed search system with all sorts of clear search features.
I personally, am happy with using emClient for my archive, but thought perhaps the OP wanted an archiving system with the additional features I didn’t know a simple export would provide.
Thanks for the search tip on exporting. That is much better than my idea. I didn’t know you could export search results.
Why export the messages from one application, only to import them into another application so you can search them?
eM Client offers Automatic Archiving, which will remove the messages from the server thus freeing up space, but store them in a separate set of folders within the database. They are fully searchable there. Maybe that is a better solution.
For what it’s worth, my reason for wanting this is that I am collecting a bunch of writing snippets. I’m going to organize them later, but for now I just want to easily capture them as simple text files.
I guess copying and pasting from eM Client is going to be the easiest thing to do - at least that does not introduce a bunch of extra line breaks. Still, a simple text file is the most basic file format - it was strange to not have that be an option.
Well Gary, now that we know the OP didn’t want archiving, I’d like to give you the use case that will occur for me. I use emClient’s automatic backups to keep 5 rotating backups which are then automatically backed up to both an external drive and the cloud. The emclient data folders are very complex, that is probably why your backup makes a single zip file. I’m good with that. But I can imagine that in a decade my backup, even zipped could be HUGE. I run a business, and rightly or not, prefer not to delete client emails, even old ones. But eventually, an entire 10-20 gig backup file could be going to be backed up to the cloud every day. Huge single file uploads (usually Quickbooks or Outlook pst files), are problematic. So, I’d like to export say those older than 4 years from your database into another database and remove them from emclient. They don’t need to be continuously backed up, but they might need to be examined sometime.
Honestly, I’ll probably not wait 10 years, but do something like this after about 6 years export those older than 3 years, and repeat the process every 3 years. Just to keep my emclient database smaller and cleaner, my daily backups smaller, and yet not lose the old emails.
Does emClient have a good way to do this without using another program?
I have not yet ported the AutoHotKey/speech commands that I used to do something like this from Thunderbird and Outlook to eMclient, but the basic idea has always been:
“Copy as if reply”
Reply to the message
Switch to the reply window
Select the bottom quoted text, skipping or deleting any new stuff added at the top.
Put it into the clipboard
I usually do this to try to get all of the nice HTML like formatting into my clipboard, suitable for pasting into my OneNote notebook (where I keep track of just about everything I do), or posting to a wiki or webpage.
But I don’t think it should be hard to convert it to non-HTML plaintext. Oh you might have to filter out the HTML links left behind.
Putting in the clipboard is suitable for my purposes, but again it should not be hard to have AutoHotKey save it to a file.
I’ve just come across this seeking an answer to the same question. What I notice is the same sort of response I used to get from IT guys at the company I worked for. ‘Why would you want to do that?’ Well, in my case because I want a simple text file to keep for my records and to pass on to others in one of my WhatgApp groups.
I could of course save as a PDF, which is what I would normally do. But this email contains a lot of email addresses (more than 40, most in the ‘To’ section) that I don’t want distributed but appear on the PDF. But I do want to keep the sender and subject fields. I honestly don’t see why that should be so difficult. I ended up sort of using a method suggested here, copying and editing items from the Mail Header, then copying and pasting the body text. Bit of a pfaff for something that should be an easy option.
I would add that Outlook does offer ‘Save to text’ which would do that.