VBA Outlook code to open Mail Item and Save As text

Question

I'm receiving Outlook mails that have other Outlook mails (*.msg) as attachments. I need them in txt format (or anything else Word can open).

I seem to have two choices:

1) Save the attachments to my drive as text files, rather than msg files. I have no idea how to do that, either manually or by code.

2) Save the attachments as msg files (I got a macro here on SO that does that), then open each file and save it at txt. But File-->Open in Outlook 2010 has no option for opening msg files. The only way I can see to open the file is to (manually) view the folder in File Explorer and double-click it. Once its open, I can use File-->SaveAs.

3) I could open and save the file in VBA. Or can I? (It seems you can't record a macro in Outlook the way you can in Word or Excel, or I would have tried it.)

EDIT: I tried Dmitri's suggestion, and this seems to work:

 Dim oNamespace As NameSpace
 Dim oFolder As Folder


 ' Get a reference to a NameSpace object.
   Set oNamespace = Application.GetNamespace("MAPI")

 ' Open the file containing the shared item.
   Set oSharedItem = oNamespace.OpenSharedItem("D:\temp.msg")

' Save the item to the  folder.
   oSharedItem.SaveAs "D:\temp.txt"

No, I got it working with a fuller version of the code above. — Shawn V. Wilson

Dmitry Streblechenko Dmitry Streblechenko · Accepted Answer · 2016-08-15T22:19:57

Save the embedded message attachments as MSG files (Attachment.SaveAsFile), then open then using Namespace.OpenSharedItem.

If you want to access the embedded message attachments as messages without saving them, you'd need either Extended MAPI (IAttach::OpenProperty(PR_ATTACH_DATA_OBJ, IID_IMessage, ...), C++ or Delphi only) or Redemption (it exposes Attachment.EmbeddedMsg property).

VBA Outlook code to open Mail Item and Save As text

1 Answers