Got an email saved as .eml and nothing to open it with, or an Italian PEC certified email with postacert.eml and daticert.xml inside? Drop it here to read the message and save the attachments. For PEC messages and receipts you also see what kind of receipt it is, the certified date and time and whether the provider's signature is intact. All in your browser: the file is never uploaded.
Published on · Updated on · by Maurizio Fonte
The file stays on your device: reading, attachment extraction and signature checks happen in your browser. Remote images in the email are never loaded.
In your webmail or mail app, download or export the message: the option is usually called download, save as or export, and it produces an .eml file.
Drag it into the box, or tap it to pick the file from your phone or computer. A postacert.eml taken out of a PEC message works too.
The top line tells you whether it is an ordinary email, a PEC message, or an acceptance, delivery or non-delivery receipt, with the certified date and time.
Confirm the provider's signature is intact, read the original message, download the attachments, or copy a report to keep.
An .eml file is an email saved exactly as it travelled: headers, plain text, HTML version and attachments, all in one text file defined by the Internet Message Format standard. A mail client opens it, but on a phone or on a computer without Outlook or Thunderbird set up it often does not open at all, or shows up as a wall of code.
Many online viewers solve that by asking you to upload the message to their server. An email is rarely harmless: invoices, contracts, bank details, personal conversations. This page reads the file inside your browser and sends nothing anywhere. You can check by opening the page, switching off your connection and dropping the file: it keeps working.
The HTML body is shown in a sandboxed frame where scripts do not run and remote images are never fetched. Many emails carry tracking pixels that tell the sender when and where the message was opened; here they stay silent. Images embedded in the message itself are shown normally.
With Italian certified email there is more to read. A PEC message is an envelope signed by the mail provider that holds three things: a text summarising the transmission, the original message as postacert.eml and the certification data as daticert.xml. Receipts have the same shape. Whoever opens the file sees attachments with technical names and cannot tell which one is the message or what the receipt proves. The page recognises the envelope, names the receipt, reads the certified time and verifies with your browser's cryptography that the provider's signature is intact, so you know the receipt was not touched after it was issued.
PEC (Posta Elettronica Certificata) is Italy's registered email: messages and receipts are signed by accredited providers and have legal value, and Italian companies, public offices and professionals are required to have an address. If you deal with an Italian supplier, landlord, court or tax office, you will meet it. Each step of a PEC message produces a document signed by the provider. The sender receives three of them:
The recipient gets the certified message itself: the transport envelope, with the subject prefixed by "POSTA CERTIFICATA:" and the original message attached.
A delivery receipt can be full (it contains the original message with its attachments), short (it contains fingerprints of the message parts) or summary (no original message). Only the full receipt shows what was delivered, not just that something was.
AgID describes PEC receipts as enforceable against third parties. If you need one as evidence, keep the receipt file as you downloaded it, in .eml format: a printout or a PDF loses the provider's signature. Anyone documenting a formal notice in proceedings should check the format those proceedings require: this page reads the receipts, it does not certify them.
An ordinary .eml follows RFC 5322 for headers and MIME for its parts: a plain-text body, an HTML body, inline images and attachments, each encoded and separated by boundaries. The viewer decodes every part, rebuilds file names in any character set and lets you save each attachment as it was sent.
PEC technical rules come from Italian Presidential Decree No 68 of 11 February 2005 and its technical annex, also described in RFC 6109 published by the IETF. A PEC message or receipt is an email signed by the provider in S/MIME format (multipart/signed). Inside the signature you find:
Headers say what you are looking at: X-Trasporto: posta-certificata for the message, X-Ricevuta with the type for receipts, X-Riferimento-Message-ID to link receipts to the message. The provider's signature covers the whole content: change one character of a receipt and the check fails. That is the check this page runs.
Technical terms used on this page, briefly explained.
Laws, official tables and reference implementations the logic of this tool was checked against.
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