Recently one of my colleagues decided to copy about 40 emails to our server volume for a group of us to inspect the attached files. However, she made the assumption that we were all using Entourage, so she casually exported each of the mails as .eml files. Which is great if you're using Entourage, but not so great if you don't.

So rather than go through all the effort of installing Entourage and then configuring user accounts on 10+ workstations, or even finding a handy little program to do a batch conversion to something all of us could access, I wondered if, .eml being a packaged file of some sort, maybe Stuffit Expander could help out ... and hey, presto! It worked!

By simply dragging all of the .eml files onto Expander, it generated a separate folder in the Finder for each .eml file. Into that folder, it expanded all the relevant attachments (as files), plus a copy of the message body text. The only drawback I've noticed so far is that none of the header information is copied into the message file.

I have only tested this hint with Stuffit Expander versions 9 and 10. Other versions remain untested. I hope this helps some other poor soul out there like me.