Saving a .msg from Outlook that contains inline images for offline viewing

Question

I'm trying to create an offline archive of my emails for future reference. I chose Outlook's .msg format because

1) It's a popular format that won't die anytime soon

2) It's a single, self contained file (unlike html)

But when I save emails with inline images, they aren't embedded like attachments. Instead, they still link to their external source, so if I go offline, they won't display properly. I find it odd that Outlook would keep the attachments but not the inline images, so I assume there's a setting involved.

So my question is, how do I get Outlook to embed the inline images within a saved email, so they can be viewed offline?

Cheers

Answer 1

You can save your email messages as MSG files using MsgExtract. It allows you to:

• Download and embed the linked images in the resulting MSG files.
• Batch export the messages from several PST files preserving the folder structure.

Another alternative would be to save your email messages as PDF files instead. Some advantages:

• You can view and read the email messages by just clicking on them.
• The images are visible in the body of the PDF file.
• MsgExtract can optionally add the headers, email metadata, images and attachments to the PDF file allowing to convert them back to another formats like MSG, EML
• PDF is a standard format for archiving in general.

You can learn more about MsgExtract at:

http://www.maildev.com/msgextract/

How to download and embed the linked images:

http://docs.maildev.com/article/36-how-do-i-download-and-insert-the-html-linked-images-in-the-resulting-format

(Disclaimer, I am the author of MsgExtract)

Answer 2

I don't believe there is a way to do this with Outlook directly (see below for workaround). Some background:

The email sender has the capability to either embed images in the email or link to an external source (it is the sender's choice). It seems that Outlook complies with the choice that the sender has made. This has some pros and cons:

Pros:

• Disk space is saved because large images aren't stored on your system.
• Email senders can have 'live' emails that update images based on when they're retrieved. I just saw a cool offer count-down clock due to this capability.
• Email senders can track image viewing by looking at their server logs.

Cons:

• Bandwidth is potentially wasted if you download the images more than once.
• Clearly archiving doesn't work as you've encountered.

Here's a workaround that I found:

• In Outlook, save the message as foo.htm. This will create foo.htm and a directory foo_files (which has some metadata files, but not the images that you want).
• Now open foo.htm in Google Chrome and Save As Web Page (Complete) as foo2.htm. This will create foo2.htm and a directory foo2_files which will contain the image files downloaded.
• So now you can archive foo2.htm and foo2_files for 100% offline viewing.