Hi all,
if you have a few bucks to spend, you may use the emailchemy software
(http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/). It is not free but it
once saved my day on an Outlook Express 2GB+ mbx folder (yes it is
possible...) : Outlook Express was itself unable to transfert to imap
(completly screwed) and converting to thunderbird using MAPI also
failed. The emailchemy software on the other hand did work flawlessly.
Cheers,
Denis
Disclaimer : I have no relation to weirdkid.com other than using their
software once.
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
--
Denis Cardon
Tranquil IT Systems
44 bvd des pas enchantés
44230 Saint Sébastien sur Loire
tel : +33 (0) 2.40.97.62.67
http://www.tranquil-it-systems.fr
