My initial testing with .MSG files shows that Aspose does not know how to read these. I am guessing that they are just something similar to a Word document so I was curious if you know of another method for accessing these files with Aspose.Words.
I have a fairly urgent need to be able to use Aspose.Words to work with these files. If there isn’t any built-in support for them now is it possible to get it on the list of future updates?
Thanks,
Todd
Hello Todd!
MSG files have the same format as MHTML web archives. There are some slight differences but the same multipart principle. You can open an MSG file as text to see its structure. Currently Aspose.Words provides MHTML export facility and import is being developed. I cannot promise you exact date when we plan to release it but hopefully it is 1.5-2 months ahead.
Please clarify what you plan to do with MSG files using Aspose.Words.
Regards,
Todd, yes, let us know what do you want to do with those files.
Aspose.Network supports Outlook MSG files. It can load MSG files into its mail message object, extract properties and attachments and so on.
MSG files have quite a lot of data in them in addition to the message text. They have email message fields such as headers, addresses etc and attachments. Let’s say if the message body is TXT, RTF or HTML we would be able to import it into Aspose.Words and even import images that are referenced by the body, but we will have to discard attachments. Aspose.Words design is mainly for MS Word documents and there is no such thing as attachment inside a Word document.
Viktor, you are probably talking about different MSG files. Outlook MSG files are Structured Storage files and while I agree it appears they follow the “multipart” principle the differences from MHTML are quite big.
I am going to respond to both of you in this one post. I was going to respond that MSG files are not that close to MHTML and that youc an’t read them as a normal text file. The second post from you guys addressed that though.
After my initial post, I did discover that Aspose.Network includes several namespaces and classes that deal directly with MSG files. These classes may do what I want so let me explain to you what my purpose is.
My main need for Aspose.Words (and Cells and PDF as well) is to provide functionality to allow me to find and extract specific pieces of information from a document. The documents come in many different flavors and I recently discovered that some of them are MSG. On top of extract text, I also need to extract images.
With that said, can I use Aspose.Network to open the MSG and save the body as RTF, or text or HTML or something else that I can then open in Aspose.Words to extract the text and images? Also, if the MSG happens to have attachments (a .DOC file for example) can those be pulled from the MSG and saved so I can open them in Aspose.Words?
Thanks,
Todd
If a MSG has an attachment a .doc (or xls or ppt) file, then I think you should be able to extract it using Aspose.Network and get the file. Then you can load that document into aspose.words, cells etc.
If a MSG has body RTF or HTML then you should also be able to extract the body and load into aspose.words.
I have not checked myself and did not work with Aspose.Network much, it would be great if you check this out in the Aspose.Network forum.