I find myself in a situation where I have 4-5 years of (work) email dumped to 6 Microsoft Outlook PST files (some 800MB combined). The objective is to convert all that email into a text format that I can view, search and print from the command line on a Unix like operating system.

The current email service is outsourced (vpnc + rdesktop access), so there is no way I can interact directly with the Exchange server. I _can_ however, open the PST files in Outlook and export it to CSV there, but as Outlook can export one folder (of which I have up to 100 in each file) at the time only, it would be a long-running and error-prone, manual process.

The topic has been discussed here before:

• Manipulating MS Outlook PST files suggests Win32::OLE which depends on access to the Microsoft Exchange server.
• Reading an Outlook PST FIle proposes Personal Message Store (PST) Export Utility 1.0 which needs the Microsoft Outlook client to be installed locally.
• Module to read outlook.ost and archive.pst files suggests Mail::Outlook that interacts directly with the Exchange server, but cannot convert the files directly.

Furthermore, there are several other related projects out there:

• MailNavigator (closed source) claims to support PST file conversion. I have not been able to make it work properly (under wine, at least). The application starts, but does not show the email contents of the PST file opened.
• libpst (and forks such as this) spits out the following error when I run them:

  unknown index structure. Could this be a new Outlook 2003 PST file?
  [download]

• This is another fork of libpst. It claims to be able to convert both 32 bit Outlook files (pre 2003), and the 64 bit Outlook 2003 pst files. I downloaded and compiled this version that seems to be able to process my PST files, but the output files are all empty.

Does any of the honorable monks have experience with such issues I would appreciate them coming forward.

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