Outlook – How to convert Outlook .pst files to Evolution mail files

I have had success with two different methods:

Method A

1. Save your pst/ost files (copy to a safe place via windows explorer)
2. Re-install Outlook and set up the account, but prevent it from downloading anything.
3. Note the location of the pst/ost files for the new Outlook installation
4. Close Outlook
5. Via explorer, replace the new installation's pst/ost files with your saved ones
6. Restart Outlook

Method B: Also I have used the previously mentioned Outlook import feature:

• File > Import and Export > Import from another program or file > Personal Folder File (.pst) > locate PST/OST > Import

As for the difference between PST and OST files:

• OST files cache the files from the exchange server; they are "copies"
• PST files exist only on one computer; they are not stored on the Exchange server

I have recently run into the same problem, and needed to export close to 10GB of pst files to gmail. I also tried to use Outlook, but gave up as the process was unreliable. Here's a brief rundown of what I did, in the hope that other people will find it useful:

1) First, if you have a google apps account, just use the official "Google Apps Migration tool". If you're like me and are stuck with a normal account, read on.

2) You need to convert your PST files to the much more simple MBOX format. This can be done with Thunderbird and its import wizards which communicate directly with outlook, but I used the open source program readpst (part of the libpst project). I use Linux and simply got it from my package manager, a google search revealed a windows version here. Once finished you will have multiple mbox files, one for each mail folder (Inbox, Sent items, etc..)

3) Once you have your mbox files, use the excellent python script IMAP Upload. The scripts takes your gmail credentials, a single mbox name as input and an output folder (label) on the Gmail server.

This is what allows this difficult process to complete successfully. The script will automatically retry each mail upload on failure, and works on a single mbox file. I used a bash loop to process all my different (50+) mail folders automatically, and just let it upload for two days.

Note: This script has a problem with non-english folder names. Since most of my folder names were hebrew, I had to apply a small fix to the python file. I'll try to send it to the author. Also, gmail doesn't allow labels with multiple spaces between words, so if one of your mbox filesnames is like that be sure to fix it.

Other useful things: MBOX is a very simple format. It's really just a long text file containing all of your emails. I had multiple pst files which represented yearly archives. This means that I had the same folders in multiple pst files. Because MBOX is so simple, you can merge mailboxes by simply appending one file to the other. This allowed me to write a simple script that merged MBOX files with the same name, and very simply flatten out all of my pst files to a set of unique folders, containing all of my mail.

That's it, hopefully everything will work for you as expected :)