waveclaw's Journal: Clearing up the M$ Outlook issue

Since I posted about being able to script-manipulate Outlook files, a request to put up or shut up about those scripts has gone out. In all fairness I only pointed people at my meta-site and not my user site (with all the goodies that I've time to properly format for the web.) FYI, with the following YMMV.

Note: if your outlook folders are compressed, SOL dude. Try
Something nice to ease your pain of having to use Outlook until you export all your data to un-compressed PST format. Additionally, the *encrypted* PST files are just bit substitutions (caeser ciphers, blech.) Uncover the substitution table and it's a (relatively) simple tr to unencrypt.

Still with me? Good.

1. Put all your stuff in PST format - OST files are not a Good Thing with which to deal.
2. Goto SourceForge and download ol2mbox.
3. Build it on your Linux box. (Hopefully you have one, as your asking to move stuff from Outlook to Linux, but hey - anything goes :-) For the really brave, try building it under cygwin. Ick.
4. Get access to your PST files from above.
5. Run the tool on those files to generate all your email in Mbox format. Yes, this is a flat file format where each of your directories in Outlook will map to directories below your home dir.
6. Move these files/dirs to wherever you need/want them.

I don't like messing with PST file formats, so I use someone else's tool to do so. End of story.

For those of you with Outlook Express, try running this on your mbx file:

#!/usr/bin/perl -W
# Project: M$ E-mail parser
# File: parsembx.pl
# Description: get the emails out of
# Outlook Express mbx files and put them
# into EML text format
# Author: Jeremiah Powell
# Created: 02-AUG-2002 JPOWELL
# License: GPL 2.0
{
#read in whole files at once
undef $/;
$min_size_of_valid_email = 10; #C Programmer's Disease!!!
 
foreach(@ARGV) {
    # open the src file
    $srcFile = $_;
    open(SRCFILE,"<".$srcFile) ||
        die "Give me a mail index file to process!!!\n";
    $i = 0;
    mkdir("${srcFile}-mail");
 
    @mails = split /[^a-zA-z0-9~!@#\$\%\^\&\*\(\)_\|\{\[\]\}\-+=-`'":;,\.\/\?><\t\\\n\r\s]+/,<SRCFILE>;
    # for each Return-path in the file, get everything until the next
    # set of ugly control-characters
    foreach(@mails) {
            open(MAILDEST,">","${srcFile}-mail\\${i}.eml") ||
            die "Unable to open ${srcFile}-mail\\${i}.eml";
        #send it to the output file
        if (length($_) > $min_size_of_valid_email) {
            print MAILDEST $_;
            $i++
        } #end if
        close(MAILDEST);
    }; #end foreach
    close SRCFILE;
}; #end foreach
}

Concatenating the EML files into a coherent Mbox file is left as an exercise for the reader.