EmailAttic gathers decades of scattered email — old accounts, Google Takeout exports, and forgotten Outlook backups — and merges them into one clean, de-duplicated archive, organized by whose mailbox each message belongs to. Everything runs on your own computer. Nothing is ever uploaded, and your original files are only ever read, never changed.
Mail files: Outlook PST and OST, MBOX (including Google Takeout), and individual EML and MSG messages.
Archives (unpacked automatically): ZIP, RAR, 7Z, TAR, TAR.GZ/TGZ, TAR.BZ2, TAR.XZ, and single GZ/BZ2/XZ files.
Password-protected ZIP, RAR and 7Z archives are supported — EmailAttic asks for the password when it reaches one. Archives inside archives (a zip in a rar in a zip…) are followed all the way down to the real mail. Backup files that hide their type (.bak, .old, or no extension) are detected by their contents.
EmailAttic reads each container and works out whose mailbox it is — the account holder's own address — and files that mail under that person. A zip or folder holding several people's backups becomes several mailboxes automatically.
On the organize screen you can give each mailbox a category you name — Business, Personal, Family, anything — and choose where that category's archive goes, even a different drive. The “(no category)” row at the top of the destination list is the main archive folder: any mailbox you leave blank goes there, and it is where you choose (or change) the archive location. The main folder, your categories and their destinations are all remembered for next time, and a returning mailbox is pre-filled with the category you last chose.
An EmailAttic archive can grow over time. When you find more old email, point a new run at the same output folder — EmailAttic recognizes what's already there and adds only the genuinely new messages, skipping duplicates.
The free trial is the full app, but writes up to 100 messages total so you can see it work on your own mail. This is a one-time lifetime limit on the computer, not per folder.
To remove the limit, click Enter license and paste the license from your purchase email. Once licensed, the limit is gone and your name shows in the title bar. Registering keeps everything you already archived — a run after registering simply continues and adds the rest.
EmailAttic never connects to the internet to move your mail. All reading, de-duplicating and writing happens locally. Your source files are opened read-only and are never modified; archives inside zips are copied to a temporary folder to read them, then cleaned up.
Inside the folder you chose, EmailAttic creates an archive folder with a clean structure:
archive / <mailbox> / <year> / <year-month> / message.eml
These are standard .eml files any email program can open, readable for decades to come. A report.txt in the output folder accounts for every message read: how many were kept, how many were duplicates, and any errors.
Stuck, or something not working as expected? Email support@EmailAttic.com — include the file type you were adding and any message from the Progress panel, and we'll help. Your mail stays on your computer; we never see it.