I retired at the beginning of the year, and before leaving I saved all my personal email from my work account to a PST file. I had confirmed in advance that Microsoft has a free utility for converting PSTs to Gmail. What I didn’t realize until I was gone is that the utility requires you to have outlook installed, and I don’t have it at home.

I read that Thunderbird can import PSTs to MBOX with an add-on, but it doesn’t seem to. There are a mess of conversation utilities, but they’re all restricted to a small number of emails for the free versions.

I’ll probably just give in and buy one, even though I only need it one time for one (huge) file, but I thought I’d ask if anyone had done it and has a better option.

  • notabot@lemm.ee
    2·
    2 days ago

    It might already be packaged for whichever OS you’re running, and it comes with a utility to do the conversion. On Debian or Ubuntu it should be as simple as installing the pst-utils package and running something like readpst <path to .pst file> and it’ll leave an mbox file for you. It’s been a fair few years since I used it, so reading the documentation would probably be wise, but I remember it being pretty straightforward.

    I don’t have a Redhat machine handy right now, but it looks like the package is called libpst there. On a Mac you’d need to follow the build instructions in the git repository, but it’s not python, the main library and utils are written in C. The tarball they refer to it just a tar of the source, that you can download form the releases page. I can’t help you if your running windows, I don’t have a machine running it, and haven’t used it in many years.