OST is just a pointer to the stuff on the exchange server. You can delete that
file and it will rebuild next time you open Outlook, there's not data in it.
Converting that to a PST is just a matter of moving the files from the server
portion of Outlook to a local email file. Given that the
Thanks Mike.
What we are specifically looking for is a converter for .OST or .PST files that
have been given to me completely separated from the ability to deal with the
account live on a server. There are some good commercial solutions (Emailchemy
and Aid4Mail) that do the conversions but in
We used aid4mail in an exchange conversion several years ago and I was able to
script a loop around it to do bulk operations. Granted I did it in a way tied
to AD, the batch/vbscript was trivial to setup. But in our case we were moving
from something to exchange and only went from the legacy
Anyone point me to an open-source (preferably) or a tried and true solution for
1.. extracting just the PST part of an OST file
2. converting OST file to MBOX format
Thanks!
Kari R. Smith, Digital Archivist
MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections
617-258-5568 | smithkr (at)
