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. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
