Re: [gentoo-user] import .(dot)pst files into KMail?

[Stroller]

On Nov 6, 2005, at 8:03 pm, El Nino wrote:
>
>  my company user has his all mails on one .pst(MS outlook PST file)
> file & it contains more than 2GB. so now i have to import them into
> newly installed KMail application on my Linux box. my question is how
> can i import .(dot)pst file into KMail?

.pst files are notoriously horrible to work on - IMHO the best way to 
solve this is to set up an account on an IMAP server & in Outlook drag 
all the messages across into the IMAP mailboxes. This ensures that the 
only program dealing with the proprietary format of the .pst files is 
Outlook itself - once Outlook passes the message across to the IMAP 
server then that'll store the messages in a standard mailbox format 
like maildir or mbox. It may take quite some time to copy all the files 
across the network & onto the server but - blindly confident in 
Outlook's ability to talk to a "standard" IMAP server - I really 
believe this to be the cleanest way.

If this isn't an option then take a look at net-mail/libpst - I used 
this or something similar a number of years ago to export some 
thousands of messages from Outlook Express to mbox and it seemed to 
mostly work. I say _mostly_ because I believe there were some messages 
that got garbled, losing (I think) the date or some other header 
information.

Not only is the format of .pst files hideously complicated and binary, 
but it also changes between versions of Outlook - 2000 may not open an 
Outlook 2003 .pst file, for instance. Due to the quantity & nature of 
the messages you're dealing with it's hard to audit a conversion like 
this - this is why my preference is to get Outlook to do the donkey 
work on files of this format, rather than a 3rd-party tool.

Stroller.

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