How to validate an MSG Outlook File in Python

Today we are going to rapidly set up a system for validating MSG email files. MSG files are notoriously difficult to deal with, potentially having HTML, RTF, and plain text elements, as well as metadata and attachments. Short of booting up the Outlook mammoth to test the file, what’s a poor Python user to do? Well, I have an API for that, which I will demonstrate in a moment.

Oh, hello again. Let’s install our client:

pip install cloudmersive-convert-api-client

And now, call the MSG validation function from said client, providing an MSG file as an input.

from __future__ import print_function
import time
import cloudmersive_convert_api_client
from cloudmersive_convert_api_client.rest import ApiException
from pprint import pprint
# Configure API key authorization: Apikey
configuration = cloudmersive_convert_api_client.Configuration()
configuration.api_key['Apikey'] = 'YOUR_API_KEY'
# Uncomment below to setup prefix (e.g. Bearer) for API key, if needed
# configuration.api_key_prefix['Apikey'] = 'Bearer'
# create an instance of the API class
api_instance = cloudmersive_convert_api_client.ValidateDocumentApi(cloudmersive_convert_api_client.ApiClient(configuration))
input_file = '/path/to/file' # file | Input file to perform the operation on.
try:
# Validate if an MSG file is executable
api_response = api_instance.validate_document_msg_validation(input_file)
pprint(api_response)
except ApiException as e:
print("Exception when calling ValidateDocumentApi->validate_document_msg_validation: %s\n" % e)

And that’s it! All done. Easy.