RE: [Evolution] Importing mail from windooze?

["Daniel Ashley" <daniel 2totziens com>]

        I knew this issue would crop up again.  This was discussed about two months
ago to a fair degree so I'll cut & paste the relevant part.  The bottom line
is that the .pst file is a proprietary database file.  The one Open Source
project/group that knows how to utilize MAPI to interface with a .pst is
Netscape/Mozilla.  Someone needs to hook up with that group for a fast &
proven solution if there is a desire to automate this process.  This
automation process is key to converting a 1000+ users from Outlook to
Evolution.  Hopefully Mr. Hakala can breath some life back into this issue.
        I again implore the Evolution developers to go with runtime version of SQL
for message store and avoid the mbox route.  Mr. Hakala wrote this in mid
January:

        The only way to get at the info in a PST is through MAPI
        (not to be confused with the 12-function Simple MAPI --
        I'm talking about the fattest, most unwieldy API ever
        made;). So building a tool to migrate from a PST to
        Evolution's format is possible. This is also how you'd
        migrate someone's data from an Exchange store into Evolution
        since many corporate users are live against the Exchange
        server and use OSTs for syncing, which are really just PSTs
        at heart). Before my Microsoft days, I did a lot of MAPI
        work (as a consultant to MS) so I'd love to help out if
        people were interested in starting such a project. Thank you.
        As an aside, I don't know how Evolution stores its data, but
        whoever is working on that should really look into using SQL
        if not already.

        Please note that I do not know if Netscape's (for Microsoft) mboxes are
compatible with Evolution's mboxes.  Jeffrey Stedfast is the person to ask.
        For a fast & manual way to export a .pst to mbox is to use Netscape
Communicator on a windows box that has Outlook installed on it.  Make sure
that the import utilities were loaded and fire up messenger.  Go to the
import utility under "file".  It will automagically utilize the MAPI api and
do the import.  It does not import calendars, contacts or notes.  For those
items one would probably have to do an export using Outlooks export utility
to a .csv file and play around with converting that to Berkeley DB.

Good luck!

Daniel




-----Original Message-----
From: evolution-admin helixcode com
[mailto:evolution-admin helixcode com]On Behalf Of JP Rosevear
Sent: Friday, March 09, 2001 11:46 AM
To: Xavier Bestel
Cc: Ross Burton; evolution ximian com
Subject: Re: [Evolution] Importing mail from windooze?


On 09 Mar 2001 11:32:51 +0100, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> Le 2001.03.09 10:50:42 +0100, Ross Burton a écrit :
> > On 08 Mar 2001 19:41:04 -0500, NotZed wrote:
> > > The pst format is a proprietry database format, and although we've had
> > > a little peek at its internals i dont think anyone got very far.
> > >
> > > We will provide some migration mechanism that will probably revolve
> > around
> > > running an export program under windows first, and then importing
> > > the result to evolution, this is planned at least.
> >
> >
> > There is a library on Linux called liboe, and a program called oe2mbx,
> > which reads Outlook Express .pst files and produces a mbx.  I used it
> > last year and it mainly worked for my ~8000 messages, but it didn't like
> > three messages. If this bug has been fixed this might be worth a look
> > at.
>
> I used it for 3 folders (some thousands mail too), and didn't have any
> problem. It really should be part of Evolution!

Code from that library is in the OE4 importer.  I'm pretty sure that it
does not do .pst files from outlook.

-JP

--
--
=======================================================================
JP Rosevear                             jpr ximian com
Ximian Inc.                             http://www.ximian.com


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