[SOLVED] How to download IMAP email files as text/Word files?

pnartg

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Jun 5, 2018
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I have an email account on a webhost that uses SMTP/IMAP protocol. I have thousands of emails on there that I want to save as ordinary text or Word document (docx) files. How can I do that efficiently? It's too labor-intensive to have to manually open each one in a web-browser and copy-and-paste the FROM: address, the TO: address, the SUBJECT: and the body. I currently don't use a client - I use a web interface but I'll install a client if it offers a solution.

I've visited discussion forums for Thunderbird and Outlook and people were asking similar questions but finding it hard to get good answers.
A web search showed up this article (https://www.lifewire.com/save-emails-as-plain-text-outlook-1173728) - but I saw other people say the resulting files are cluttered with HTML or XML. Does anyone know if this is true?

Thanks in advance.
 

pnartg

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Jun 5, 2018
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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.
 

USAFRet

Titan
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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 in the browser is already rendering the HTML.

Saving the source, to incl To/From/Body....it may well be the bare ascii of the body. Which means all the HTML/XML tags.


A very convoluted train of Outlook -> Access -> Word could save these as individual Word files. Or rows in an Access DB.
I've done that before.