Guides, tips, and email know-how

Someone forwarded you an email attachment ending in .msg and your computer has no idea what to do with it. You double-click and get a blank icon, an “unknown file type” warning, or a prompt asking you to choose an app from a list where nothing looks right. The short…

Saving an Outlook email as a PDF on a Mac should be simple, and sometimes it is. The complication is that “Outlook email” means two different things depending on where the email is sitting. If it is open in Outlook for Mac, you can print to PDF in a few…

You dragged an email out of Outlook, attached it, and sent it. Then the reply came back: “I can’t open this.” The attachment looked fine on your end and arrived as an unreadable blank icon on theirs. This is one of the most common friction points in business email, and…

Converting an email to PDF for a compliance file, an HR investigation, or an audit response raises a question that rarely gets asked until something goes wrong: how much of the original email is still in that PDF? A PDF that shows the message text but drops the sender address…

An MSG file from someone you don’t recognize deserves the same caution as any unexpected email attachment — because functionally, that’s exactly what it is. What actually makes an MSG file risky An MSG file itself isn’t inherently more dangerous than a regular email, but it can carry the same…

A full Outlook mailbox usually isn’t full of things you need — it’s full of large attachments and old threads nobody’s opened in years. Here’s how to bring the size down without losing anything that actually matters. Start with the biggest offenders Outlook can sort by size — in the…

An MSG file that won’t open almost always comes down to one of a handful of causes. Here’s how to work through them, starting with the most common. 1. You don’t have a MAPI-compatible application MSG files require an email client that understands Outlook’s MAPI structure to open natively —…

Converting emails one at a time works fine for the occasional message. It falls apart fast when you’re exporting a shared mailbox, responding to a records request, or archiving before an employee departure — and that’s exactly where batch conversion matters. What batch conversion actually does Batch conversion doesn’t merge…

This is general orientation, not legal advice — retention requirements vary by industry, jurisdiction, and the specific regulations that apply to your organization. Confirm requirements with your legal or compliance team before setting policy. There’s no single answer to how long you should keep email — it depends heavily on…

MSG and EML are both ways of saving a single email as a file, but they come from different origins and are built differently under the hood. Where each format comes from MSG is Microsoft Outlook’s own format — proprietary, and built around Outlook’s internal data structure. EML, by contrast,…

When you convert an MSG file to PDF, attachments aren’t dropped or ignored — they’re appended into the same PDF, right after the email body, so you get one combined document instead of a separate file for each attachment. How it actually works The conversion happens in a specific order:…

You don’t need Microsoft Outlook installed to open an MSG file — you just need the right approach for your situation. Here’s what actually works. Why MSG files are hard to open in the first place An MSG file isn’t plain text — it’s a proprietary binary format Outlook uses…