MSG to PDF, open the message, then save it.

An MSG to PDF converter opens an Outlook message file and turns it into a PDF you can keep, print or send to someone without Outlook. This one reads the .msg file in your browser. It shows the From, To, Cc, Date and Subject lines, the body with its inline pictures, and the attachments with a Save button each, then saves the message as a PDF in one of two ways.

How to use it

1. Drop an .msg file on the box, or click it to choose one.
2. Check the message in the frame. Under Show, choose The styled message or The plain text, when the message has both.
3. Choose the Paper, A4 or US Letter.
4. Press Save as PDF and pick Save as PDF as the destination in the print window. This keeps the layout, the colours and the pictures, and the text can be selected.
5. Or press Download simple PDF for a file made here at once: the header lines, the plain text, the pictures that were inside the message and the attachment names.
6. Press Save next to an attachment to keep it, or Save all as ZIP.

What it shows

The sender, the To, Cc and Bcc recipients with their addresses when the file has them, the date in your own time zone, the subject and the body. A message that has an HTML body is shown styled, with its inline pictures. If it has plain text as well, you can switch to that. A message that was saved with only an RTF body, the older Outlook rich text form, is shown as plain text, without fonts or colours. When Outlook wrapped an HTML message inside its RTF, the HTML is taken back out of it, and the message shows styled. A picture from the web inside the message is blocked until you tick Show pictures from the web, because loading it tells the sender you opened the mail.

An attached Outlook message, which Outlook saves inside the outer file, has an Open button. It opens in the same frame, can be saved as a PDF like any message, and a Back link returns to the one you came from. It cannot be saved on its own as a .msg file.

What is inside an .msg file

An .msg file is a small file system in one file, the Compound File Binary format, that holds a list of properties: the subject, the body, the dates, one folder for every recipient and one for every attachment. Microsoft publishes both formats, in MS-OXMSG (revision 18.0, 20 May 2025), MS-CFB and MS-OXRTFCP, the way the RTF body is compressed. All three were read on 19 Oct 2026. The reader on this page is written from them and uses no outside library.

Worked examples. The file is cut into sectors of 512 bytes (4,096 in newer files), and the header takes the first one, so sector 3 starts at (3 + 1) × 512 = byte 2,048. A value shorter than 4,096 bytes sits in a "mini stream" cut into 64 byte pieces, so a 100 byte value takes 2 pieces, 128 bytes. Dates are counts of 100 nanosecond steps since 1 January 1601. The gap to 1 January 1970 is 11,644,473,600 seconds, or 116,444,736,000,000,000 steps, so a stored value of 132,539,328,000,000,000 is (132,539,328,000,000,000 − 116,444,736,000,000,000) ÷ 10,000,000 = 1,609,459,200 seconds after 1970, which is 1 January 2021 at 00:00 UTC.

Common problems

• The subject has strange letters. Some older files store text in the code page of the computer that wrote them and do not name it. The page then goes by the message's language, for example Japanese means code page 932. If a name is still wrong, the file does not say enough to read it correctly.
• The simple PDF shows question marks. The simple PDF can write Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic and other alphabets show as a question mark there. Use Save as PDF for those.
• No From line. A message that was never sent, such as a draft, has no sender. The line is left out.
• A calendar item, contact or task. It is an .msg file too. The page says what kind of item it is and shows the parts that look like a message.
• Pictures are missing. Pictures loaded from the web are blocked by default. Tick the box to load them.

The paper choice sets the size of the page. The margins, and the header and footer line of the print window, come from your browser's print settings, which this page cannot change. If you have the message as an .eml file, use EML to PDF. To split a long PDF afterwards, see split PDF, and to join several messages into one file, use merge PDF.