Is there a way to copy the HTML out of an Outlook email?

Question

The scenario is that I often get outlook emails sent to me with content that I need to paste into an HTML formatted newsletter.

A lot of this formatting is minor...namely bolded text and hyperlinks.

I'd like to be able to select the paragraph in outlook, copy, then paste into my HTML editor with the HTML.

So if outlooks has this:

This is bold and this is a link.

I'd like to paste it like this:

<b>This is bold</b> and <a href="http://example.com">this is a link</a>

Alas, it doesn't do that, it just pastes the raw text like this:

This is bold and this is a link

So for every section I have to constantly go into my text editor and re-apply tags as needed. Not a huge deal...except when you multiple this x20 or so and then it just gets tedious.

Is there any way to copy the content from outlook and retain the HTML formatting as actual HTML?

Answer 1

the problem here is that styled text in Outlook is not always sent as HTML.

But you can find out easily enough. (Note this works on Outlook 2016. other versions might be different.)

Hold down the ⌥ Option key on your keyboard and click on the message in Outlook's message list that you want to see the source for and select "Show Source" from the menu that pops-up.

If it was sent as HTML you will see the HTML code. But a lot of people use what outlook calls "Rich Text" which embeds the email as an '.rtf" document. Which is fine as far as it goes as Rich Text Format is a standard that most word processors can read and write (like the macOS textedit.app).

So some (if not many or most) of your emails won't be in HTML format at all.