Unable to extract mails saved in local folder

[prashantmoger]

Hi , Iam new to poewr bi. I have multiple .msg files saved in a local drive folder. Each .msg file has a table in it's body that I need to consolidate into an  in Excel.

But iam not able to extract contents of the mail. Please let me know what M functions can be used to extract the Text body.

[AlexisOlson · Accepted solution]

I don't think there is a straightforward way to do this. There's an idea related to this but it doesn't have many votes.

https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=031df74f-f03e-454a-a6c8-c08b99503bd9

Theoretically, since an .msg file is basically a .zip file with various contents including the text of the body, you could decompress it and pick out the appropriate text. I tried but failed with this approach.

See @ibarrau's and @lbendlin's blog posts as well as @artemus's comments:
https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/PowerQuery-Decompress-zip-Files/ba-p/1326035

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/Working-With-Zip-Files-in-Power-Query/ba-p/1190186

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Power-Query/How-to-connect-Azure-DevOps-REST-API-in-to-power-bi/m-p...

For the time being, you'll likely need to convert .msg files to a friendlier format before importing them into Power BI.

[prashantmoger]

Thanks for the reply

[lbendlin]

Yeah, good luck with that.  

How would you know that the higlighted file contains the raw message body?

and this is only for plain text messages. Pretty sure RTF and HTML formats are packed differently.