Convert email to plain text

Why convert email to text

A raw email is a MIME document: headers, boundaries, base64, quoted-printable, an HTML part full of tables and inline styles. Getting the actual words out is the first step of almost anything you want to do with them — search an archive, index it, count keywords, read it on a device that does not render HTML, or pass it to a script or a language model.

MXcatch does that step for you and saves the result as an ordinary .txt file.

What the text file contains

From: Acme Billing <billing@acme.example>
To: invoices@your-domain.com
Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2026 09:12:44 +0100
Subject: Invoice INV-4471 for October

Hi,

Please find attached invoice INV-4471 for October, due on
28 November. You can pay by bank transfer to the account
on the invoice.

Thanks,
Acme Billing

• A header block with From, To, Date and Subject.
• The body as plain text. MXcatch uses the email's own plain-text part, which most senders include. When there is none, the HTML is converted to text.

Attachments are not converted into the text file. They are kept as separate files beside it.

Convert every incoming email to text

Actions that store or send the message — Save to S3, Save to Dropbox, Save to Google Drive, Forward and Discord — have an Also save as option. Tick plain text and a .txt file is created for each email that arrives at the alias.

In your own bucket

With Save to S3, the file is written as message.txt, filed by date:

mail/2026/11/14/20413/message.eml
mail/2026/11/14/20413/message.txt
mail/2026/11/14/20413/attachments/INV-4471.pdf

The date-partitioned layout means a script can pick up one day's text files with a single prefix listing — a simple way to feed a search index or a nightly job without parsing MIME yourself.

In Dropbox or Google Drive

With Save to Dropbox or Save to Google Drive, message.txt goes in the email's own folder, next to the original message and its attachments.

Attached to a forward

With Forward, the .txt file is attached to the forwarded email.

Setting it up

1. Add your domain and point its MX records at MXcatch — per-provider instructions.
2. Create an alias, or turn on catch-all to convert everything sent to the domain.
3. Add an action via Domains → your domain → the alias → + Add action.
4. Tick plain text under Also save as and send a test email.

Download a single email as text

Every message in the MXcatch inbox has a Download menu. Choose Text to get the .txt for that message. PDF, JPG, HTML and Original (.eml) are in the same menu.

When you want data, not files

A folder of text files suits search and archiving. If you want each email as fields — sender, subject, body — consider the alternatives:

• A spreadsheet row per email, with the text body in a column, via the Google Sheets action on the Business plan (€19/month).
• A webhook that POSTs the parsed message as JSON to your own endpoint.

Other formats

Plain text drops the layout on purpose. To keep it, save as HTML; for a fixed document, PDF; for a picture, JPG. You can tick more than one format on the same action.