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RFC reference:
RFC 1341 - base64 Mime encoding and layout of mime headers RFC 2183 - Content-Disposition for describing email attachments

LibPST v0.3.4

Several more fixes. An Infinite loop and incorrect interpreting of item index attributes. Work has started on making the code executable on big endian CPUs. At present it should work with Linux on these CPUs, but I would appreciate it if you could provide feedback with regard to it's performance. I am also working with some other people at make it operate on Solaris.

A whole load more items are now recognized by the Item records. With more items in Emails and Folders. I haven't got to the Contacts yet.

Anyway, this is what I would call a minor feature enhancment and bugfix release.

Dave Smith
<dave.s@earthcorp.com>

LibPST v0.3.3

Fixed several items. Mainly memory leaks. Loads of them! oops..

I have added a new program, mainly of debugging, which when passed an ID value and a pst file, will extract and decrypt that ID from the pst file. I don't see it being a huge attraction, or of much use to most people, but it is another example of writing an application to use the libpst interface.

Another fix was in the reading of the item index. This has hopefully now been corrected. The result of this bug was that not all the emails in a folder were converted. Hopefully you should have more luck now.

Dave Smith
<dave.s@earthcorp.com>

LibPST v0.3.2

Quick bugfix release. There was a bug in the decryption of the basic encryption that outlook uses. One byte, 0x6c, was incorrectly decrypted to 0x6c instead of 0xcd. This release fixes this bug. Sorry...

LibPST v0.3.1

Minor improvements. Fixed bug when linking multiple blocks together, so now the linking blocks are not "encrypted" when trying to read them.

LibPST v0.3

A lot of bug fixing has been done for this release. Testing has been done on the creation of the files by readpst. Better handling of large binaries being extracted from the PST file has been implemented.

Quite a few reports have come in about not being able to compile on Darwin. This could be down to using macros with variable parameter lists. This has now been changed to use C functions with variable parameters. I hope this fixes a lot of problems.

Added support for recreating the folder structure into normal directories. For Instance:

each folder containing an mbox file with the correct emails for that folder.

Dave Smith
<dave.s@earthcorp.com>

LibPST v0.3 beta1

Again, a shed load of enhancements. More work has been done on the mime creation. A bug has been fixed that was letting part of the attachments that were created disappear.

A major enhancement is that "compressible encryption" support has been added. This was an incredibly simple method to use. It is basically a ceasar cipher. It has been noted by several users already that the PST password that Outlook uses, serves no purpose. It is not used to encrypt the PST, it is mearly stored there. This means that the readpst application is able to convert PST files without knowing the password. Microsoft have some explaning to do!

Output files are now not overwritten if they already exist. This means that if you have two folders in your PST file named "fred", the first one encountered will be named "fred" and the second one will be named "fred00000001". As you can see, there is enough room there for many duplicate names!

Output filenames are now restricted. Any "/" or "\" characters in the name are replaced with "_". If you find that there are any other characters that need to be changed, could you please make me aware!

Thanks to Berry Wizard for help with supporting the encryption.

Thanks to Auke Kok, Carolus Walraven and Yogesh Kumar Guatam for providing debugging information and testing.

Dave Smith
<dave.s@earthcorp.com>

LibPST v0.2 beta1

Hello once more...

Attachments are now re-created in mime format. The method is very crude and could be prone to over generalisation. Please test this version, and if attachments are not recreated correctly, please send me the email (complete message source) of the original and converted. Cheers.

I hope this will work for everyone who uses this program, but reality can be very different!

Let us see how it goes...

Dave Smith
<dave.s@earthcorp.com>

LibPST v0.2 alpha1

Hello!

Some improvements. The internal code has been changed so that attachments are now processed and loaded into the structures. The readpst program is not finished yet. It needs to convert these binary structs into mime data. At present it just saves them to the current directory, overwriting any previous files with the attachment name.

Improvements over previous version:
* KMail output is supported - if the "-k" flag is specified, all the directory hierarchy is created using the KMail standard * Lots of bugs and memory leaks fixed

Usage

ReadPST v0.2alpha1 implementing LibPST v0.2alpha1 Usage: ./readpst [OPTIONS] {PST FILENAME} OPTIONS:

        -h      - Help. This screen
        -k      - KMail. Output in kmail format
        -o      - Output Dir. Directory to write files to. CWD is changed after opening pst file
        -V      - Version. Display program version

If you want to view lots of debug output, modify a line in "define.h" from "//define DEBUG_ALL" to "define DEBUG_ALL". It would then be advisable to pipe all output to a log file:

./readpst -o out pst_file &> logfile

Dave Smith

LibPST v0.1

Hi Folks!

This has been a long, hard slog, but I now feel that I have got somewhere useful. The included program "main" is able to read an Outlook PST file and dump the emails into mbox files, separating each folder into a different mbox file. All the mbox files are stored in the current directory and no attempt is yet made to organise these files into a directory hierarchy. This would not be too difficult to achieve though.

Email attachments are not yet handled, neither are Contacts.

There is no pretty interface yet, but you can convert a PST file in the following manner

./main {path to PST file}

This is very much a work in progress, but I thought I should release this code so that people can lose their conception that outlook files will never be converted to Linux.

I am intending that the code I am writing will be developed into greater applications to provide USEFUL tools for accessing and converting PST files into a variety of formats.

One point I feel I should make is that Outlook, by default, creates "Compressible Encryption" PST files. I have not, as yet, attempted to write any decryption routines, so you will not be able to convert these files. However, if you create a new PST file and choose not to make an encrypted one, you can copy all your emails into this new one and then convert the unencrypted one.

I hope you enjoy,

Dave Smith