I'd like to make another plea for a little more .eml support. For example, at the moment, the preview pane does not even display the "Date Created", which is absolutely vital for making sense of an email message.
My problem is reading archived .eml files, and more importantly, reading specific individual email files stored in working directories alongside other relevant materials --- for example, receipts stored as .eml files in tax files alongside .pdf and .txt and other files. At the moment, I have to turn to an .eml reader in the context of doing other multi-window tasks, and everything gets clumsy and time-consuming.
Here are four specific small-scale suggestions that would have made my life a great deal easier during this year's tax time.
THE PREVIEW PANE:
Print all the headers at the top, particularly the "Date Created".
Give a list of attached files down the left or at the top or bottom of the preview panel, and the ability either to preview or to open them.
Option to unblock pictures.
The viewer already seems to select Plain or HTML quite effectively.
THE COLUMNS:
4. There are masses of column options for movies and pictures. Could we possibly have options just for these five .eml-specific columns:
"Date Created"
"From"
"To"
"Subject"
"Attachments" (Yes or No)
The "Subject" and "To" columns would normally not fit into a reasonable width, but the purpose of them is sorting.
These four things appear to be within DOpus' normal design constraints. I presume that they also apply to .msg files.
And finally, I know that DOpus is not, and never will be, an email client, so there is nothing here about creating, sending or receiving.
The .EML preview handler is part of Windows and we have no control over what it shows.
Quick View Plus includes an alternative .EML preview handler which shows more information (see below). If you install QVP you'll need to move the .eml extension over to it, via the Opus ActiveX plugin's config window (see below), but that only takes a second.
Thanks for the reference to Quick View Plus. My experience with it, however, was not good --- see below.
Let's leave preview panes aside --- what I really, truly need most of all is sorting options, which is central to the structure of DOpus. At the moment I have no way to sort a subdirectory of emails on, say, "Date Created", and move the earlier half of them to another directory. Or to isolate all the ten emails from in the "Friends" directory from John Citizen so that I can find the one that I want. Or to find all the emails in the "Cars & Travel" subdirectory with RTA in the subject. Or to find all the attached receipts in emails confirming purchase of software.
Could I reduce my plea to the minimum, and ask purely for the option to add these columns for .eml files:
"Date Created"
"From"
"To"
"Subject"
"Attachments" (Yes or No)
I'll be happy then, and my whole .eml email archiving system will flourish and blossom as it should.
[To report my experience with Quick View Plus, which doesn't give these essential sorting options. First, it's expensive. Secondly, my first request to download the Trial resulted in no reply. Thirdly, I requested again and received it, installed it, and configured it to preview .eml files. The result was that DOpus crashed every time I selected an .eml file, or a .txt or .log or .tex file. In fact, only .pdf files seemed not to crash DOpus. I rebooted --- same result. I then uninstalled Quick View PLus and rebooted, and all was back to normal. The last error message that I received reported that "The error (0xC0150010) occurred in thread `dopus.viewpaneloader' at address 0x76E53D5B." I am running 32-bit Windows 7 Professional, with Kaspersky Pure.]
Just out of interest, if you turn on the Subject field (in the Documents category), do you get a subject showing for .eml files? Same for the "Document created date" field?
If so, we may be able to add support for the other fields fairly simply.
Thanks for the reply. I've turned on the 'Subject' field and browsed through various directories containing .eml files, but nothing at all appears in the 'Subject' field.
The 'Document created date' yields the same date and time as the 'Modified' column. This is unfortunately irrelevant, because it is the date and time that I exported the file from 'The Bat!', not the date and time when the email was created.
I presume that the information for the five columns that I have stated has to be read out of the standard headers at the top of the .eml file, and I am assuming also that this requires a reasonably straightforward macro.
Perhaps I am pressing the wrong buttons. I right-clicked next to 'Name' at the top of the lister, then
Columns - - > Documents - - > Subject. I also saved the lister with its new columns as the default lister, closed DOpus in the system tray, and restarted, but still the Subject field is blank. I also tried exporting by right-clicking on an email in The Bat! and saving as an .eml file --- still no luck. My installed version of DOpus is the most recent, 10.0.3.0.4392.x86.
I checked the headers of one of the files with Notepad, and the header looks in order,
Subject: Your E-Toll account statement
Each email opens properly with the very basic MiTeC Mail Viewer, showing the header.
I fired up Microsoft Outlook 2010 and saved a file from there by the same method of dragging it to a DOpus directory --- Outlook generates an .msg file rather than an .eml file. Still the 'Subject' field is blank.
I checked what happened on my 64-bit Windows Home Premium laptop. Same result --- the 'Subject' field for .eml files is blank.
My emails are all .eml files saved from 'The Bat!', mostly saved by dragging a bunch of files into the DOpus directory where I want them archived. This method causes the Subject to be used as the filename, so the 'Subject' field is actually not so crucial for sorting as the other four columns that I mentioned.
Opus doesn't generate these columns natively, so I'm wondering if they're actually coming from the system because Office is installed. Julianon - do you have Office?
I don't have Office installed. I think in my case the columns are generated by a column-handler (PXCInfoShlExt Class) of Tracker Software's PDF-Xchange Viewer.
Thanks very much for these questions --- I do hope that I am not pressing the wrong buttons. I have Office 2010 installed, and I use the free PFD XChange (Version 2.5, Build 200.0) as my default PDF Viewer, and NitroPDF 7 as my pdf editor. I don't actually use Outlook --- it's all configured to receive my POP email, but I only launch it occasionally to test things. Ditto for my laptop.
I switched on the Columns - - > Document - - > Authors column, but it it also blank on .eml files. In fact, I can only find non-blank entries on Excel and Word files. Ditto on the laptop.
I tried again dragging emails from Outlook to .msg files in a directory. Still the 'Subject' and 'Authors' fields are blank.
I turned on the metadata pane, but the only data showing are the 'Date Created' and the 'Date Modified', which are the same, and are the time when the email was dragged into the directory.
I fired up Thunderbird --- which I don't use anymore, but keep updated --- and dragged a few old emails to a directory as .eml files. Still the 'Subject' and 'Authors' fields are blank.
I am presuming that DOpus can be made to read the headers of .eml files.