Re: [Evolution] Converter for *.pst files

[Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk yahoo co uk>]

On Tue, 2004-08-10 at 18:38, Robb Westby wrote:
> I have recently converted to Evo 1.4.6 and would like to import old
> MSoutlook files that are archived as *.pst format.
> Is there a filter for accomplishing this?

Oh boy - my experience of doing that was bloody awful :) (not Ximian's
problem at all - typical Microsoft not acknowledging that other products
to their own exist, and so not supplying specs for the pst format,
meaning that that 3rd party utilities to do the job are a little clunky
to say the least)

I ended up using the outport utility running under windows, which from
memory gave me a whole bunch of files; from there I transferred
everything over to the Linux system. Then I had to write a script to
strip DOS-style line terminators from each message, and fix the broken
headers that outport (maybe broken within the pst format itself?)
sometimes produced in order to get the mail headers into a standard
format. 

> From memory, sometimes outport/pst stuck tab characters rather than
spaces after header fields (e.g. From:\tblah rather than From: blah),
used incorrect month names in dates (January rather than JAN etc.), and
used the Sent: field only rather than Date: which confused Evolution
when importing.

The script I threw together just ran through a single directory, calling
dos2unix on each file, sed to tweak the dates and stray tab characters,
and formail to rewrite the Sent field to Date, before appending the
whole lot to a single mailbox file in each directory that could be
imported.

I couldn't figure out how to include attachments by doing things this
way, but at least evo could import mail. This isn't a suitable method if
you have lots of attachments that you need to import too. I *think* I
had some issues with sender / recipient fields too for local addresses
to the original network, as in the source pst files they obviously
weren't in a x y z style format. Not sure if I ever worked that one out
or not...

I'm pretty sure I posted the script I hacked together here, so it should
be in the archives somewhere.

Not a pleasant experience, and I'm glad I only had to do it the once!
(For which I of course blame MS and their proprietary formats, not
Ximian!)

For some reason (which I've since forgotten) running things via Mozilla
for windows didn't work for me - quite possibly because I was missing
vital mail-handling library files on the current Windows 2000 system
(which I've never used for handling email; the pst files I needed to
import to evo were a leftover from an NT system a few years ago)

ps. in my case the pst files came from systems running Exchange clinet,
not Outlook; I don't know if there's any/much difference between the
two.

cheers

Jules