Quick Look of email (file.eml)

[spegahsheen]

Hi, I recently upgraded from El Capitan to Monterey on my iMac (late 2015) and almost everything works fine. However, my iMac is no longer able to show the preview of the emails that I saved as file.eml. These files are represented as generic documents in the Finder and if I press the spacebar it shows a blank window with a gear constantly rotating. I found on the Internet that this problem was already present on Catalina, and I checked some solutions that did not suit my case: folder /Library/QuickLook/ empty; Mail.qlgenerator not present in /System/Library/...
I recovered a Mail.qlgenerator package from the El Capitan library, but I don't know if it can be useful or how to install it on Monterey. So I don't know how to solve this problem. Do you have any good ideas please?

 

[Bigwaff]

Try associating EML files with Apple Mail. Quick Look feature might work then.

Choose an app to open a file on Mac

In the Finder on your Mac, select a specific app to open a file.

support.apple.com

 

[Brian33]

However, my iMac is no longer able to show the preview of the emails that I saved as file.eml.

I was curious so I saved an email as (raw message source) an .eml on my Monterey system. Attempting the spacebar-quicklook action shows me a few of the mail headers but none of the body. Seems odd that Apple would have taken this ability away.

I then got 'Mail.qlgenerator' from a Mojave boot disk and copied it to /Library/QuickLook (the empty directory -- that's were local additions should logically go). I logged out and back in... but it still didn't work.

There's a command line tool 'qlmanage', and the command qlmanage -m lists the detected generators. It does list my added generator (note that it's in /Library and not /System/Library like all the others):

com.apple.mail.email -> /Library/QuickLook/Mail.qlgenerator (3445.104.21)
com.apple.mail.emlx -> /Library/QuickLook/Mail.qlgenerator (3445.104.21)

...but, it doesn't seem to work... : (

 

[spegahsheen]

I tried running qlmanage -t message.eml to get the thumbnail and got the error message instead:

qlmanage[32662:552114] Persistent UI failed to open file file:///Users/myName/Library/Saved Application State/com.apple.quicklook.qlmanage.savedState/window_1.data: No such file or directory (2)

 

[spegahsheen]

Workarounded: rename the file.eml to file.html 😕