Our Picks for the Top 9 Free MSG Email Viewers in 2023
Last Updated on 27 December 2023 by Olga Lapshinova
Those among you who are prudent enough about their emails, have probably backed them up already, resulting in archive files such as MSG, EML, MBOX, or PST. But the question is: where do I open it to preview content and attachments? Here comes the job of email viewers’ desktop apps. You can find a dozen of these apps on the market, but you will be surprised at the differences between them in terms of quality and functions.
We have gone through the process of installing and testing 9 different viewer distributions to accurately rank their pros and contras. In this comparative study, we have paid particular attention to important factors such as stability, wide filetypes support, ease of use, and speed at launch among others. Let us see at the end who is the winner.
Top 9 Email Viewers Comparative Matrix Table
Table of Contents
Email Detail Viewer | SysTools | Free Viewer | MailsDaddy | Encryptomatic | RecoveryTools | CubeXSoft | Free Opener | Kernel Data Recovery | |
Universal email viewer | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
Supports Outlook MSG | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
Supports EML | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Supports MBOX | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
Supports OST | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
Supports other email formats | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Opens and displays attachments inside the viewer | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
Sorts emails | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
Saves and displays metadata | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
Displays emails with non-Latin script and emojis | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
No .NET framework is needed for installation | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✓ |
Supports enterprise infrastructure (e.g: Citrix) | ✓ | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | ✓ | ✗ | Undisclosed |
Can be additionally customized by request | ✓ | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | ✗ | Undisclosed |
Price for commercial use | $45 | $69 | $69 | $39 ~ $49 | $139 | $29 | $23 ~ $79 | — | — |
Free customer support | ✓ | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | Undisclosed | ✗ | Undisclosed |
What to Look for in an email Viewer
| 🗃️ How many file types it can open? |
| Some email viewer distributors will have different apps, one for each file type. To be able to open the five or six most common email file types, you have to install each one of their email viewers separately, instead of one email viewer that opens all formats, which is much handier. . |
| 🐤 Is it stable, fast, and lightweight? |
| You wouldn’t want an email viewer that takes ages to launch, and bloats your computer’s hard disk or working memory. We shall also add stability, these are all factors related to the software architecture and how efficiently the email viewer was built. We were looking for an email viewer that has a snappy UI and can open the email file types in seconds, in addition, does not overload the hard drive. This should work even for computers with slow specs. . |
| 👨💻 Does it faithfully renders the email? |
| Emails can be written in so many languages. The Unicode standard was designed so that non-Latin characters can be displayed too, across different OSs and software platforms. But some viewers would not render oriental scripts, special characters, or emojis, and would replace them with placeholders or glitchy text. . |
| 📎 Are attachments displayed natively? |
| Of course, we want to save emails along with attachments, whether it’s office documents, PDF files, images, or even multimedia files. Thus, the email file here acts as an archive file that includes various attachments. And the email viewer should act as an unpacking tool. Unfortunately, not all email viewers perform this function, and those that do may not allow viewing these attachments if you do not use their proprietary file readers, such as MS Office, Adobe PDF, or Photo apps. . |
| 🤝 Does it offer respectable customer support? |
| You may have occasional problems with certain mail encryption, or perhaps you just want to know how to set up an email viewer in corporate infrastructure, and you will need the help of a specialist. A convenient email viewer should have a support team that can quickly answer technical questions from customers or even setup requests (for those email viewers that offer white labeling to corporations). . |
| 💰 The price point |
| And finally, the price tag. Most email viewer distributors generate revenue by either subscribing to a subscription-based model or simply charging you a one-time price, which we think is fairer. Some, as you will see, will be free even for personal use. But in general, prices vary depending on the number of licenses requested and the features that the email viewer offers. |
9 – SysTools Viewers
SysTools provides an application that allows you to open MSG email files. The SysTools MSG Viewer Freeware:
- makes it possible to view the files and attachments embedded in those MSG files
- comes with three views: HTML, HEX, and RTF
- can perform some control on the attachment, such as zooming in/out and rotating it
The application’s interface menus are a bit tiny and may be too cumbersome for users who only want to view their emails.
The folder tree is on the left panel, and the list of MSG files is on the main panel, while mail takes up to 1/3 of the screen.
You can choose vertical or horizontal viewing mode.
If you want to convert MSG files to PDF, you are invited to upgrade to the Pro version of SysTools for $69.
The distribution of the same SysTools tools under different names and on different domain names is quite confusing.
8 – FreeViewer
SysTools confuses us by renaming its email viewer listed above to another domain name called FreeViewer. Initially, we thought that FreeViewer was an independent viewer, so we installed the executable file only to realize that it was nothing but SysTools, but with some aesthetic settings.
This is all the more misleading because there is a third SysTools clone on a third domain name with a completely different website design. We quickly noticed this redundancy, as when installing it, we were offered a screen with a message that “we have already used the trial period of this software”.
But apart from this reassignment issue, we found out that the prices and offers listed are the same, and we are often redirected to the parent company’s website when clicking on any of the domain name hyperlinks.
When we first started FreeViewer, we received an error message that contained the name “SysTools MSG Viewer”:
7 – MailsDaddy
Some users have reported that MailsDaddy Free MSG Viewer does not work without first purchasing a license, even if it is advertised as free for personal use.
The installation process is excruciatingly long, despite the fact that the installation file weighed only 7 MB. This is by far the slowest viewer to install out of all nine tested.
But after you overcome these torments and get access to the software itself, you will find that it has a fairly ordinary user interface that allows you to access MSG messages, including their properties and attachments.
After long-term use, we noticed a few problems:
- It does prominently show a “Search Mails” button on its toolbar, but after testing it, we found out that it is unable to search in the body of the email itself, and it only searches for keywords in the “subject” title, which is unsatisfying and rather clucky.
- One of our major complaints about MailsDaddy is the UI: for example, if we resize the dialog windows, some of the UI buttons on the edge hide as you can see in the screenshot below:
- And last but not least, it’s not free, even for personal use you should buy a license for $39. You will always be reminded to upgrade to that paid version, which is not something we usually expect from a software that chooses to put the word “Free” in its name.
Overall, Free MSG Viewer is a tolerable email viewer but being that it only works with MSG formats, and makes upgrading to its pro version a priority, we think it would not live up to many users’ expectations.
6 – Encryptomatic Message Viewer Lite
It is a simple viewer for opening only Outlook’s MSG or EML files, and winmail.dat TNEF files as well, designed for people who just want to open these three email formats, without bothering with any other features. It has the benefit of making their attachments available as clickable links on the top.
But what put us off with Encryptomatic Message Viewer Lite is that prior to installing it, we needed to install .NET Framework first, which is an additional package that many other viewers didn’t require. This is a big hassle during installation, and might lead to some unnecessary dependencies or even collapse the software if Microsoft decides to release a non-backward compatible fashion.
Vendor Encryptomatic seems to have ported this same software as a cloud service, which is similarly opening the three aforementioned email files, but via web browser without installation.
Although this option appears alluring, some users might feel unsafe sending their private emails to unknown servers on the internet. Remember, viewing your emails offline on your local machine is always the safest and most quick-to-open option.
5 – RecoveryTools Viewers
RecoveryTools Viewers allow you to open various email formats, so we choose to test it with their MBOX Viewer.
The developer has totally missed the aesthetic of the software, with its archaic UI. Also, we are constantly bombarded with pop-out windows seeking us to upgrade to a Pro version like these:
Our trust in RecoveryTools started fading away because of two reasons:
- After we downloaded and launched the viewers from the RecovertyTools website, we found out that the software is titled “BitRecover” which is a different software developer. This latter also offers the same viewer for download, but in larger file size which may suggest that the one by RecoveryTools is a limited version of the original by BitRecover. We don’t know the nature of the relationship between both software providers because there is no mention on the RecoveryTools website, but we think it is rather disconcerting to customers.
- The search feature could work better: it highlights the word in the first and last email, while missing the ones in the middle, even if you click on “next” and “previous”, which by the way don’t get any keyboard shortcuts.
4 – CubeXSoft Viewers
CubeXSoft viewers are only capable of opening MSG, EML and NSF email file formats, and still you will need a separate installer to open each of these file formats. So it’s far from being a universal tool. Moreover, each installer file is too heavy. And please note that what is advertised on their website as an MSG viewer, isn’t in fact a viewer. You won’t be able to have any preview of your MSG emails using it, as it is actually a converter with certain limitations on how many emails to convert per folder as seen here:
But most importantly, the claim of being totally free is misleading since almost all useful features are hidden behind a paywall, and the button “Buy Online” on the toolbar always reminds you of that.
Overall we think CubeXSoft doesn’t qualify as a robust or multi-format email viewing software.
3 – Kernel Data Recovery Viewers
This is another viewer which has separate software for each file type: PST, MBOX, EML, EDB, OST, and OLM. But they missed one of the most important filetypes, which is the MSG, the proprietary format of Outlook to save single emails.
The UI is pretty austere and non-consistent across the different viewers. For example, if you have become familiar with their MBOX viewer, it doesn’t mean that their EML viewer would be clear for you too. They look totally different. So, it may take extra time to master them all and switch between them.
Again, the viewer is just a front to advertise for commercial versions of the converters, for example, the OST to PST Converter will cost $69.
We wanted to find positive points about Kernel Data Recovery solutions, but the inability to view or even download attachments was a deal-breaker for us. Although we can see the attachment as icons, there is no way to click for downloading or extracting them.
It is also worth mentioning the absence of a metadata view of the email header information.
During the testing of the EML Viewer, we couldn’t even see the plain content of the email, as the screenshot below illustrates.
So our verdict about Kernel Data Recovery – it is a big fail.
2 – Free Opener
Free Opener by EZ Freeware is able to open regular email files like EML, MSG, and others, but the developers stopped technical support, so there is no guarantee of stable and safe operation.
It is free to use, but it does not offer the features or attachment support that is offered by the other software that we reviewed.
These sorts of universal openers might also suffer from rendering issues of certain types of emails, especially those with oriental scripts.
Free Opener also doesn’t score well in terms of ease of installation, since it requires the .NET framework to be installed beforehand. We think there are better alternatives.
1 – 🏆 Email Detail Viewer (EDV)
Email Detail Viewer is a universal email file type viewer: so you can open all email formats using just one software. And it not only opens the usual EML, MBOX, PST, and MSG files, but also less common EML, EMLX, MIM, and VCF, BKF, OLM, EDB, and OST email formats which could be used by some email service providers. This is a larger array of compatibility than its direct competitors.
Moreover, it is for free use and doesn’t place limitations like its competitors. It only requires a license for commercial purposes on a large number of PC.
Other benefits:
- intuitive email viewing interface
- smooth toggling between emails
- access to email attachments
- Tab navigation
- email headers/metadata preview
- software stability
- and even customer support, which other software vendors only offer to paid customers.
It is a stable and adware-free software from a company that has been trusted by prestigious law firms and clients worldwide. On a technical note, it allows email files to be viewed in two ways:
- by exploring all email files from the provided file tree.
- by directly selecting the chosen email file by navigating to its location from the navigation window.
With the latest update (version 5) it is now possible to view attachments directly in Email Detail Viewer. This feature saves time and money since you won’t need to juggle between EDV and Word every time you need to view a DOCX attachment, and you won’t even need to buy Word for it to work!
It is also worth mentioning you can preview the HTML or TXT versions of each email, as well as metadata, headers, attachments, and contacts, all laid out in structured tabs. The name says it all, you view “email in detail”.
Email Detail Viewer has also passed the test of viewing email contents with non-ASCII characters, while some other email viewers failed, showing junk characters instead. This is particularly important if your email consists of non-Latin letters or special characters.
Email Detail Viewer was designed with enterprise infrastructures in mind, for remote usage over the network and virtualization. It is perfect for deploying on Citrix and similar virtualization infrastructures in a short time and without trouble.
Email Detail Viewer is produced by the same developers of Email Detail Litigation and Email Detail Archive, reputable tools for e-discovery and conversion of all popular file formats into PDF. This association reinforces the trust and legitimacy of the Email Detail brand.
Conclusion
We believe Email Detail Viewer is the email viewer of choice. It does the job neatly and without bugging you with upgrade-to-pro invitations behind every menu, within the compass of its free license, without any limitations. This makes all other tools pale in comparison as far as pricing is concerned.
All you have to do is to download it and try it for yourself.
If you are worried it might take up too much space on your PC, then rest assured because the app has a very small footprint, which also explains why it launches on the computer at blazing speed. Click on the banner below to test!
