Moving my Outlook PST file to any BSD E-mail client

[John Mills]

Freebies -

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004, epilogue wrote:

> On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 09:20:43 -0700 (PDT)
> "Joshua Lewis" <jmlewis at dslextreme.com> wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone know of an e-mail client that supports importing an outlook
> > .PST file.
> 
> i don't know of clients which support both (not that they don't exist),
> however there are tools out there to convert between the formats.  i have
> not used any myself, so i cannot speak to the degree of success in 
> converting (though i assume its good).

I recently migrated a friend's e-mail from Outlook [Distress?] to MacOS-X. 
I had a bit of handwork, but basically:

 1) Exported the Outlook info in 'csv' format
 2) Exported a sample address book as csv from my target (maybe the Mac 
    mail reader - I don't remember, but anyway it's a system resource in
    MacOS-X: one address book seems to fit all clients)
 3) Loaded both into a spreadsheet - probably StarOffice so try OpenOffice
 4) Moved a few fields around so the Outlook export would match the target

NOW:
 5) Saved from the spreadsheet in Data Interchange Format
 6) Slurped the *.dif into the new agent.

There are scripts for much of this, but I was as well off 'by hand' for
this one shot. You may be able to skip some steps depending on your source
and target options.

HTH.

 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu