[Dovecot] Converting Outlook .PST's (was: Suggested IMAP Directory Size..)
Elizabeth Greene
egreene at globaloptions.com
Mon Oct 15 19:28:31 EEST 2007
Not likely.. The PST file format that libpst can read is limited to
2GB.
-ellie
On Mon, 2007-10-15 at 12:17 -0400, Benjamin R. Haskell wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Oct 2007, Ilo Lorusso wrote:
>
> > [...]
> > I know the users also have large OUT LOOK pst files 4.5GIGs and wondering if
> > I could also intergrate that into IMAP?
>
> It can be done, but it is a nightmare. For post-2003(?) Outlook .PST's,
> the only sensible, non-commercial path I could find was through
> Thunderbird's import. Uploading directly to the server (Even if you ran a
> local server!) was horrendously, painstakingly slow, and rendered the
> Outlook user's computer unusable for that time.
>
> (If you're feeling lucky, Google libpst. Maybe your Outlook is old
> enough that it supports the format.)
>
> Via Thunderbird:
>
> 1. Open all the .PST's you want to convert in Outlook, and, if possible,
> make sure those were the only .PST's open.
>
> 2. Be sure to 'compact'/'compress' each one, to get rid of deleted
> messages (excluding those in 'Deleted Items'. Uggh.).
>
> 3. Make sure Outlook is completely closed, and not accessing any .PST's.
>
> 4. Open Thunderbird.
>
> 5. Import mail from Outlook.
>
> This gets you mbox files with the same hierarchy that you had in Outlook.
> I then wrote some Perl scripts to deal with these. In my case, I was
> combining several users' folders into a single shared hierarchy. Maybe you
> can run some mbox2maildir program and be done with it.
>
> Caveats:
>
> - If possible, change the location of Thunderbird's profile directory to a
> short path name. (e.g. C:\convert) The default path to local folders:
> C:\Documents and Settings\%USER%\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\(random string)\Mail\Local Folders
> means that approximately 100 of your 255-character limit for filenames are
> chewed up.
>
> - Thunderbird will mangle folder names that contain 'odd' characters. I
> never figured out what characters caused trouble, but the following were
> definitely OK: [A-Za-z0-9. ]
> (I found the odd foldernames running:
> find (dirname) -type d | perl -lnwe 'print if /[\da-f]{8}/'
> They always ended in a string of hexadecimal digits.)
>
> - Thunderbird doesn't seem to like non-Latin-1 headers. (I didn't find
> this out until someone noticed it a while after the conversion.) This
> means QP-encoded headers. (In my case, ISO-2022-JP.)
>
> Best of luck. I don't envy your task. :-)
>
> -- Ben
--
Elizabeth Greene
IT Manager, GlobalOptions FSIU Division
615-665-5555 (Office)
615-456-9813 (Mobile)
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