There’s a low-priority task at work where we get emails that contain data that should eventually be saved out as individual reports and saved in folders named for the associated client. No one’s been doing them so I’ve got an email folder with 2100-some-odd unread emails (and maybe 200-300 that were read but not processed in the same email folder).
What I’d like to do is export the whole kaboodle to some common file format like tab-delimited-text or comma-separated-value or Excel, something that I can import into a database and then script the spitting-back-out of them as separate text files with calculated names.
What Outlook seems to offer me is export to Outlook’s own proprietary “attachment” format (.pst), or PDF, or one individual email at a time to a few other options. On the other hand, I’m totally not an Outlook person, so I’m hoping I’m just not looking in the right places.
In a pinch, mass-forwarding them to my personal account would probably work (since I could parse a native Eudora mailbox file with far less frustration since it’s plain text) but I don’t see a method of doing that either.
Anyone here able to point me in the right direction?
A couple options that might work for you depending on the data in the message and how you plan to extract the important info from them:
- Select multiple emails in Outlook (using shift-click) , then choose Save As from the File menu. It will save all the selected emails in a single text file. This might work if you can easily parse the individual messages from the big file.
- Select multiple emails, then drag them into a File Explorer window. This will save them all individually as .msg files. It’s not a simple text format, but you might be able to extract the important data from them.
Hold on, there’s a much easier way. Use the Export function you found earlier, but select CSV format instead of .pst. That will get you a spreadsheet with each email in a separate row and columns for subject, body, etc.
The export function under the File menu is limited to acting on my own account. This is one of those fancy shared accounts and its folders don’t appear when I go to invoke export.
I’m going to try your other suggestion about highlighting and doing a Save As.
ETA: It’s cranking away. Looks like it will take awhile to export them all but I can work with that plain text format.
Good luck! If that single file doesn’t work, maybe try dragging all the emails from the shared folder to a local folder (hold down Ctrl if you want to copy them and leave the originals alone). Then you should be able to export them from your local.
Worked fine. Exported all data from the same client on same day to one PDF each and moved them to the appropriate folders. All done. Empty folder where folder containing 1500-someodd emails had been.