[Dovecot] Converting Outlook .PST's (was: Suggested IMAP Directory Size..)

[Elizabeth Greene]

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)