Decoding Outlook's HTML emails?

G

GlennM

Does anyone know if its possible to save the HTML (source) of an
Exchange/Outlook email to text without having to open the email
itself?

I have searched for answers to this and am pretty sure it can't be
done - but thought I'd post a question just in case.

Currently we are manually going through emails recieved on our
Exchange server, right clicking and selecting "View source" and then
searching for "href" or "src" tags in the HTML code to find the actual
links these things are connecting to and then adding these to our spam
block lists so we don't get future spam from them.

Unfortunatly its slow and manual. We though we could speed it up by
automating the finding of the "href" and "src" tags. However, here's
were we hit a problem. You can just copy the email to a Windows
folder, you get a *.msg file. You can open this in Notepad for example
(and I've tried other methods), you can see the TEXT used in the
email, but no HTML, just a lot of garbage. It looks like Exchange
stores the plain text of the message and then also a seperate HTML
version of the email, and the HTML is encoded in some way.

Does anyone know how to uncode it, or is it in some sort of Microsoft
only format? I even looked at a few programs on the web to do this -
but all they do is get you the TEXT part of the message, the don't
actually read or convert the HTML section at all. In fact this is only
what the Save-as text option in Outlook does anyway.

Any clues?

Thanks.
 
G

GlennM

Brian Tillman said:
Pocketknife Peek can do this. See http://www.xintercept.com/pkpeek.htm

Thanks Brian.
Doesn't really achieve what I want, as I want to get the source HTML
of multiple emails without having to open each one and individually
saving the source. Although Pocketknife Peek doesn't open the email
itself, you'd still have to save the HTML source one at a time - which
is what I was trying to avoid.
It does however mean that there *is* some way to read the Outlook .msg
file encoded HTML - Pocketknife can. But *how* does not seem to be
freely available. Never mind - I'll have to trash that idea!
Thanks anyway.
:)
Glenn
 

Ask a Question

Want to reply to this thread or ask your own question?

You'll need to choose a username for the site, which only take a couple of moments. After that, you can post your question and our members will help you out.

Ask a Question

Top