In the day-to-day admins often come across situations where they have to export Microsoft Office 365 emails to EML file format. This requirement arises for many diffrent reasons for example building a backup, setting a temporary format to act as a bridge between two different platforms, or as a way to maintain universal accessibility, which won’t be possible with Microsoft’s proprietary PST format dont work in many external clients.
No matter what your reason might be we will help you in your quest. Let us start by discussing reasons to choose what is so special about this format.
Why Many Choose to Save M365 Emails as EML?
The most common reason for using EML files comes down to their basic design. Each message is stored individually, making it less prone to systemic failure. Even if a single EML file gets corrupted, damaged, or deleted, it has little to no effect on other files.
Another reason is that EML is an old format, which is often considered a drawback. However, its age means that a wide variety of providers offer native support for it, allowing it to be used almost anywhere.
There may be many more scenario-specific benefits you can take advantage of by keeping emails in EML format. So, let’s see how to get emails in that format.
Export Microsoft Office 365 Emails to EML via Outlook Client
The Outlook web app does not allow you to drag and drop Office 365 emails into your local machine. So those who are using the web portal must do the following.
- Open any email that they want with a .eml extension.
- Click on the 3 horizontal dots (more actions button) to toggle a fly-out menu.
- Then hit the Download option.
- This will open a new window titled Outlook.com wants to save
- Browse for a suitable location and hit save.
You can also use the preinstalled Outlook desktop client on your Windows machine to set up your account and continue from there.
Once the desktop client is up and running all you have to do is select one email drag it outside of the Outlook window and drop it in a file on your desktop.
You may get a file that may harm your PC alert cross it and let the download finish.
If you feel that Drag and drop is too casual then you can use the direct download option as well.
To access it put your cursor on any email and right-click you should see a “Save as” option. Hit it and Outlook opens up a new window where you can browse exactly where you want this email to be.
These steps may seem seem and they are to an extent. As there is a major limitation. We explain what that is in the next section.
Limits of Manual Download Process to Get EML out of Outlook
As soon as you select more than one email, the Download option disappears from the fly-out menu.
You can right-click and check; it’s not there anymore.
So this means you have to manually select each and every mail you wish to save from your O365 mailbox to EML.
It is not a problem if the number of emails is small. However, this quickly becomes a challenge the moment a bulk transfer is required.
The drag-and-drop feature is similar; you can only use it to transfer one email at a time from your inbox to the Desktop. Even if you select more than one, only the first one gets downloaded. Outlook outright ignores the rest.
So for this reason many users and admins want an alternative that works without any such limitation.
How Professional Should Export Microsoft Office 365 Email to EML?
By using SysTools Microsoft 365 Export tool admins can pull all the organizational email data from the cloud and save it in Electronic Mail file format.
Below are the steps to use it.
Step 1. Download the tool on your machine, register, launch, and activate. Then select the source as Microsoft 365, and Destination as File System.
Step 2. Scroll down a little there you will find the workload options from where you can select Emails.
Step 3. Apply a date filter if you only want to extract the data from a particular time period otherwise continue with the default.
Step 4. On the source screen, you need to validate the Admin email and App ID.
Step 5. On the Destination screen validate the path where you will deposit the resultant EML.
Step 6. Use the mapping page to Fetch, Import, or Download Template and Upload the user list.
Step 7. Preview the User list select the ones whose emails need to be kept in EML apply priority to a few accounts whose data is more critical than others, Click on Validate then Export.
Conclusion
Now admins know all there is to export Microsoft Office 365 emails to EML format. With the techniques outlined in this write up they can successfully download a functioning copy of M365 data with the .eml extension. The direct drag and drop is simple to do but not practical for a large number of conversations organization-wide. So admins can instead take help from the professional product explained alongside the manual method.