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I have a user who will be retiring in a few days. He's been tasked with dumping out all mail that is related to the organization's customers and classifying it under our organizational structure before he goes. I'd like to make his life a little easier by dumping all of his mail from his pst to a folder that retains his inbox folder structure. I'm stumped. Any ideas?

Justin
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    `1.` If the user is using Exchange, why do they have a PST file? `2.` I've never heard of dumping the contents of a mailbox or PST to the file system. – joeqwerty Jan 26 '15 at 22:32
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    Don't take this as criticism, just trying to understand - what is it about dumping the mailbox to the filesystem that will make things easier? He can just drag and drop out of Outlook, and then the filesystem is not cluttered with the junk that doesn't get moved. – squillman Jan 26 '15 at 22:33
  • @Joeqwert: 1. I dumped the mailbox to PST - really a I can use either the mailbox or pst at this point; 2. It's because he's worked here for so damn long and hasn't filed anything under the current file classification. – Justin Jan 26 '15 at 22:42
  • Yeah, I'm not seeing how you could dump those to the file system as a usable, browse-able hierarchy of messages. Do you use Public Folders in Exchange? – joeqwerty Jan 26 '15 at 22:45
  • @Squillman: He has literally hundreds of folders. Each one, he's had to create a new folder on our file server, select the contents of the outlook folder and drag them out. We're in the process of transitioning to an EDRMS (Electronic document and records management software) and require it for our records classification scheme. I'd love to avoid it, but in gov't you don't have a choice. Doing this work now beats the hell out of going through his mailbox every time someone needs something. – Justin Jan 26 '15 at 22:46
  • @Joeqwerty: I figured as much. Never hurts to ask :P – Justin Jan 26 '15 at 22:47
  • Ok. It sounded like he has to take items out of his folder structure and drop them into an existing (different) folder structure on the filesystem, picking and choosing what is important to save along the way. If it's just a blind dump then it certainly makes more sense to automate. – squillman Jan 26 '15 at 22:48
  • I wrote an Outlook plugin at one point to do just this type of export. I'll see if I can dig it up. – squillman Jan 26 '15 at 22:48
  • You're my hero. – Justin Jan 26 '15 at 22:51

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The Personal Storage Table format is at its core a binary tree database, much like the Extensible Storage Engine format that Exchange Mailbox Database files are based on, and the contents are not directly transferable to the filesystem.

If you want to interact with, and extract items from a .pst file, you'll need to use Microsoft's PST File Format SDK, and develop a custom tool to do so.

If you just want to browse the contents of the PST, you can use the accompanying PST ViewTool

Mathias R. Jessen
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