How to open .msg and .eml email attachments in Confluence

Why Confluence can't show the email

A .eml file is the raw text of an email; an Outlook .msg file is a binary container. Confluence Cloud previews images, PDFs and Office files (Atlassian: Work with images, videos, and files), but it has no viewer for email formats, so both show up as a file on the page, with no email preview. Atlassian tracks requests for this: CONFCLOUD-74736 for .msg, and CONFCLOUD-41597 for .msg and .eml.

Option 1: download and open in a mail app (free)

Download the attachment and open it in a desktop mail client. Outlook for Windows opens both .msg and .eml. Apple Mail and Thunderbird open .eml, but not .msg; for .msg on a Mac you need a separate viewer.

The catch: every reader downloads a copy outside Confluence, the page itself stays uninformative, and if the email was attached precisely because it looked suspicious, opening it in Outlook is the one thing security training says not to do.

Option 2: convert before uploading (free, needs discipline)

Renaming .msg to .eml does not work; the formats are unrelated. What does work is saving the email as PDF before attaching it, or pasting the relevant text into the page. You lose the headers and the original file, and it only helps when whoever uploads remembers to do it, every time.

Option 3: a Marketplace app that shows the email on the page

Marketplace apps add a viewer inside Confluence, so the email is readable where it is kept. There are only a few for email formats; compare them on these points:

• Where the email is processed. Prefer apps that render in your browser with no external servers ("Runs on Atlassian"), so the email never leaves your site.
• Both formats, including .msg files that only carry RTF, and forwarded emails that were attached without a file extension.
• An overview. On pages that collect several emails, a list with subject, sender and date beats clicking through bare file names.
• Safety of rendering. Scripts, forms and remote images inside an email should be stripped before anything is shown.
• Export. If the page goes out as PDF or Word, the email should export as readable text, not disappear.

Full disclosure: Dortus makes such an app. MailView for Confluence adds an "Email (MailView)" macro that shows a chosen .msg or .eml attachment on the page, and an "Emails on this page" list with a verdict icon for the 10 newest emails. Every email you open gets a plain-English phishing check (authentication results from the headers, domains with lookalike letters from other alphabets or with accents, links whose text points elsewhere), and the PDF and Word export of the page includes a clean version of each email shown with the macro. It stores nothing and sends nothing anywhere.

Which option fits

An occasional email on a personal page: downloading is fine. A space that documents decisions, incidents or customer requests with the original emails attached: a viewer keeps the page self-contained, keeps readers out of Outlook, and keeps the email readable years later in exports and archives.

Short answers

Can Confluence Cloud preview .eml or .msg natively? No. Both stay files on the page, with no email preview (Atlassian: CONFCLOUD-74736, CONFCLOUD-41597).

Does renaming .msg to .eml work? No. The formats are unrelated; the renamed file stays unreadable.

Do email attachments survive PDF export? Natively they export as a file name only. A viewer app can include the email's content in the export.

Questions

Spotted something wrong on this page, or a case we missed? Email support@dortus.com.

See also: Outlook .msg vs .eml and How to open .msg and .eml attachments in Jira