Please help me retrieve archived email

[citronella]

Some time ago I sent a pile of emails from my old work email (pc) to my hotmail account at home (on iMac). Now I can't read those emails because they are in ".eml" format and I don't have the application to convert them.
Does anyone know which application I need and is it free?
I desperately need access to those emails as they have important legal information but I don't work at the same place anymore so I can't go back to the originals iyswim.

All suggestions gratefully received but I may not be able to respond until later today (am at new work)

Which Email Program did they come from?

You can try just dragging the file into Safari or there's a Text Editor somewhere in the Applications folder that might also be able to open them.

If you're lucky then they'll just be text files where the main body will be readable.

I would have thought most email programs could import .eml files, e.g. Thunderbird has an extension for it.

kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_and_exporting_your_mail

What do you use now. Do you have an email program or do you just use webmail?

LittleMachines make a progam called Outlook2Mac which will do what you want and as far as I know is the only way to do it (actually I can think of another way but it's even more complicated). However it runs on a PC, so you will have to get hold of a PC, import the .eml files into Outlook on that machine, then run Outlook2Mac (having installed it on the PC), which will create files that you can import on the Mac (having transferred them to it on a memory stick or something).

All a bit of a hassle but it will work. If it's only one or two messages maybe it's not worth it and you could just open them as text files on the Mac, but if you want to see them properly as mailboxes and attachments, this is the way to do it.

Thank you for your replies and sorry it has taken me so long to get back online.
The files did come from Outlook but I am using hotmail on the Mac. I don't have a pc but maybe I can get hold of one. Will try the text file thing too.
What is Thunderbird?
Thanks again.

Thunderbird is an email client. Kind of like Outlook Express, but better.

When you say you are "using hotmail on the Mac", as far as I know there is no hotmail program, so I guess you are using the web interface?