Question

Working with .EML and .PDF files, merge a message so there is one multipage .pdf per inbound email

Laserfiche Cloud Workflow Import Agent Laserfiche API

Updated February 11

asked on February 8

We’re developing an Accounts Payable process where invoices arrive in a shared Outlook inbox, which is monitored by Laserfiche Email Archiver. Each email includes a message body and one or more PDF attachments.

The requirement is to merge all content into a single PDF file—including the email body and all attached invoices—so that the file can be routed for approval via user tasks.

Our Laserfiche Workflow searches the repository, identifies emails with the same unique identifier, merges the pages, and then deletes the original attachments. Everything is working as expected, except for one issue:

The email body is saved as an .eml file, which doesn’t have pages, meaning we’re losing the text from the email message during the merge.

Is there a way to convert the .eml file into a PDF so that it can be included in the merged document?

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Replies

replied on February 9 • Show version history

Hi Sean,

Are you using self hosted or cloud? I've written a workflow activity for self-hosted to join PDFs together that could be used. I can talk to you about how that works, or you could write your own.

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replied on February 9

Hi Ben, thanks for responding. We're using cloud and have also configured a workflow to merge the .PDF's however the message body from the email is in .EML format and therefore does not merge properly. I think we need a process to convert the eml to a pdf so the entire message and content can be archived however there is no obvious function to accomplish that?

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replied on February 9

Oh, i just noticed, the body text is not exactly "lost", rather it is not visible on the page layer however it does present in the text view. It's not ideal but at least we have the content.

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replied on February 10

I can see the text from the .eml file, if i run a workflow with an extract text activity then it errors with the "entry does not have a page" (or something similar) even though i can see the text. I was thinking that if i could extract the text somehow then i could pop it onto a word doc template and create a .pdf but can't figure a way to accomlish this.

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replied on February 11 • Show version history

Hi Sean,

For cloud, you could try these activities in sequence:

Retrieve Document Text
Create Entry
Attach Electronic - to the new entry, a word doc from the server.
Update Word Document - perform a field merge with your text, and comvert to PDF

Let me know how you go! It's not going to be merged but I guess the next step could be to create a document relationship link with the Create Link activity.

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Question

Working with .EML and .PDF files, merge a message so there is one multipage .pdf per inbound email

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