Our document management system ingests RTF files best, and I need selected emails filed into it with formatting reasonably intact.
Outlook's Save As dialog on a message offers text, HTML, MHT and MSG but I see no RTF. Am I missing a setting?
Save an Outlook email as an RTF file
Solved Email & Outlook
AJ
Andrew Jackson December 8, 2018
2 replies
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Reviewed by moderators
Not missing anything: modern Outlook dropped RTF from the Save As list for mail messages, the option survives only for calendar and contact items. Getting mail to RTF takes one short detour through an application that saves RTF natively, and Word is sitting right there.
1
Open the email and save it as HTML: File, Save As, type HTML. This keeps the formatting and the header block, the parts your document system cares about.
2
Open that HTML file in Word, right click, Open with, Word if the double click goes to a browser.
3
In Word: File, Save As, and set the type to Rich Text Format (*.rtf). Word converts the rendered message faithfully since Outlook and Word share their rendering engine.
4
File the RTF into the document system, and delete the intermediate HTML plus its _files image folder unless the system also wants the images separately.
Volume changes the answer: past a handful of messages, drive the detour with a small Word macro looping a folder of saved HTML files through open and SaveAs wdFormatRTF, or skip the manual chain entirely with a converter offering RTF output against an exported PST. And confirm the document system's ingestion once with a sample containing an embedded image and a table, RTF represents both differently than HTML and one test file validates the whole pipeline before you commit hundreds.
HTML to Word to RTF preserved everything including the signature table, and the sample fed the document system cleanly. Macro built for the backlog.