RE: [Evolution] .pst (MS Outlook) import

[Ryan Waldron <rew erebor com>]

On 17 Dec 2000, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:

> > - A minimum set of message headers is exported
> > - Only the plain text body of each message is exported
> > - No allowances are made for non-ASCII characters in message headers or
> > bodies
> > - Attachments are not exported
>
>   What are these limitations caused by?  Are they hard to overcome?
> Isn't there a simple way to just retrieve the raw message with all the
> headers and without any mangling?

Easier said than done, I'm afraid.  I have spent some very unpleasant
time with Exchange, and learned a couple of nasty bits about it.

Exchange does not store messages in their pristine state when they
come in.  First it mangles them, THEN it stores them.  So by the time
it's made it into a filestore, it's already mangled.

It appears that (shock, surprise) Micro$oft specifically designed
Exchange to be VERY hard to migrate away from without losing your
messages.

But just as a f'rinstance, if a message comes in, with attachments,
destined for multiple users in the system, Exchange creates one copy
of the message and attachments, then puts a "link" (for lack of a
better word) in each user's INBOX pointing to the central message
store.  They do this to "conserve space" (which is a joke, if you saw
how incredibly much room Exchange sucks up on a drive).  But it
makes for additional indirections to be overcome when trying to
reconstruct a message, particularly a multipart one, for export to
some sane mailbox format.

I certainly do think it can be overcome, but it's not just as simple
as grabbing the original message out of a file somewhere; once
Exchange gets its claws on it, it's gone.

--
Ryan Waldron    |||   http://www.erebor.com    |||    rew erebor com

"The web goes ever, ever on, down from the site where it began..."