A Free Viewer for Microsoft Outlook .msg Files

In my day job I ran into a situation where one of my users needed to read the contents of a bunch of .msg files. We use Google Apps and don’t have Microsoft Outlook installed anywhere, so this was a bit of a problem. I hate slogging into the seedy world of Microsoft shareware, but after a quick search of my Linux tools that’s where I ended up.

To make a long story short, I eventually found a free cross-platform viewer for these Microsoft Outlook .msg files so I thought I’d share it with the Internet. Hopefully someone will stumble on this post and won’t have to download crippled trialware or risk viral infections from seedy software sites.

The aptly-named MSGViewer is what worked for me. It’s a Java webstart application, so it’s cross-platform. However it did not run on Java7; I had to downgrade to Java6 to get it to work. It is lacking print functionality, but you can copy and paste the email contents to something else if you need to print it.

[Update]
I haven’t had to use it in a long time, but some of the comments below indicate that it now works with Java7.

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