.PST Files

[Burocrat]

Welcome beginner. Please answer all of the questions below which may provide information necessary to answer your question.
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Which version of OpenOffice.org are you using? v.2.4.0
What Operating System (version) are you using? XP Pro
What is your question or comment? I had hard-drive failure and do not wish to reinstall office 2003. Now I cannot open the email address file. Is there a way to open them with OpenOffice or any other way?
Thanks

[Hagar Delest]

OOo has no equivalent to Outlook (yet). And I don't know if other application can handle .pst. Have you searched the web?

[AndrewZ]

Try this query
http://www.google.com/search?q=thunderbird+pst

[Burocrat]

Thanks for the hint. No one has been successful with the plug in for Thunderbird, so I am not even going to try it. Besides, it's all in French.

Rolf

[AndrewZ]

There are lots of ways. Did you find this article?

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Import_.pst_files

[Villeroy]

Do I understand correctly that Microsoft would encrypt my personal mail (transmitted as plain text) in a proprietary file format, so there is no easy way to read my personal mail with any suitable program at hand, including text editors?

[AndrewZ]

Do I understand correctly that Microsoft would encrypt my personal mail (transmitted as plain text) in a proprietary file format

It's not technically encrypted even if the Outlook users chooses the standard PST encryption option.

so there is no easy way to read my personal mail with any suitable program at hand, including text editors?

What do you expect from Microsoft?

To be fair, I assume the PST, like the Microsoft Office 97-2003 document formats, has some benefits (such as performance) from being in that kind of binary format. Software engineering is an optimization problem where you choose one thing at the expense of another. I've run a Linux mail server, and I suffered poor performance using the single-file mbox format until years later when I switched to Maildir which uses more than one file per email. Then the performance was great, but there are costs associated with having thousands of files per user account.

[Villeroy]

Do I understand correctly that Microsoft would encrypt my personal mail (transmitted as plain text) in a proprietary file format

It's not technically encrypted even if the Outlook users chooses the standard PST encryption option.

De facto it is encrypted unless Microsoft publishes a full documentation for this file format.

so there is no easy way to read my personal mail with any suitable program at hand, including text editors?

What do you expect from Microsoft?

Me? Oh, that's simple. Raise a weird taxation application two times a year under it's operating system called "XP" (strictly offline, never updated).
In this context my question to the original poster is: "What do you expect from any software when you wrap your mail in such a file format?"

[AndrewZ]

Do I understand correctly that Microsoft would encrypt my personal mail (transmitted as plain text) in a proprietary file format

It's not technically encrypted even if the Outlook users chooses the standard PST encryption option.

De facto it is encrypted unless Microsoft publishes a full documentation for this file format.

I meant encrypted in the sense of keeping out a third party, and I think I was incorrectly. The default encryption is cheesy like XOR or something, but it is technically encrypted.

The Microsoft Works formats were never documented, but they weren't encrypted. They were simple enough for me to develop libwps to decode them. So, I don't consider lack of documentation as real encryption. Still, I acknowledge the barrier to access.

[TheGurkha]

The low tech way is to re-install Outlook and attach you .pst, then install Thunderbird. Thunderbird will ask if you want to import from Outlook, say yes and then uninstall Outlook again.

[Hambright]

I know this is old post 4 years ago and already given Many good reply. But I want to add just one with it. I also needed to open .pst file. I had been using outlook 2007 addition. It was good. But I often feel some lack. Then I got a great tools that have meet my .pst file requirement. By using this tools I can easily open .pst file and view, search, print, reply to, and export email stored in my Outlook. Just start with it and select the folder my .pst files. Click on the .PST file to reveal folders, emails, and file attachments. Renders Outlook emails in their original html, rich text or text formatting. Export your emails to different formats, including PDF, HTML, MHT, CSV, JPG and more. Includes reply, and search capabilities. I can also open .eml and .msg files. Outlook not required.

[tuckerannabell]

Well if you have PST file with you and want to view content saved into it, then in such case you use install this application www.freepstviewer.com which is absolutely free of cost. Once the tool gets installed on your machine you can view data of all types of PST whether corrupted, password protected or orphaned.