Capturing from a Poor WebMail Interface

I wonder how others capture emails from poor webmail interfaces. Using Safari and an AnywhereConnect connection to company email (when a VPN option is unavailable), I have temporarily settled on:

  1. Open message (in my case using an Outlook Webmail interface)
  2. Choose Select All
  3. Choose Safari’s File/Services/Import to Eagle Filer.

There are other methods described in EagleFiler’s documentation, but this has several advantages:

o The EF file generated is properly sized to read without resorting to zoom
o The header information is included
o The text of the meessage can be edited, copied,etc.
o Attachments are preserved.

On the other hand, some of what appears in the EF file is irrelevant, such as the interface border. This is a big ugly, although tolerable. Something better?

I had trouble with the other methods in EF documentation but may have been doing something wrong. For example, the print to EF generated messages that were too small; copy and paste omitted headers;…

This might preserve image attachments, but in general Webmail will not make the attachments available in the page, and so they will not be seen by the Services menu or EagleFiler.

If at all possible, it’s best to import mail by either:

  1. Loading it into one of the mail programs that EagleFiler supports (e.g. by having it connect to the server), or:
  2. Exporting it from your unsupported mail program to the standard mbox format.

Virtually any other method will not make all of the message information available to EagleFiler, so either you would lose headers or attachments, or EagleFiler would not know to interpret the data as mail messages, and thus it would not display it optimally.

Lastly, a matter of terminology: I try to use the word “capture” only when referring to importing via the capture key (F1). The other methods are just called “importing.”