Why don't provide a conversion capability?

[oxcsnicho]

Wondering why an ost-to-pst conversion capability is not in place. I could be wrong, but it looks like the code base is solid enough to support such with moderate amendment. Just curious if absence of such capability is due to consideration of usefulness, or implementation effort, or other reasons.

[Dijji]

In fact, creating a new PST adds a whole range of extra structures to take care of that the current code can cheerfully ignore, such as a density list, an allocation map, a free map and a free page map. Also, IDs et cetera have to be allocated in conformance with certain rules. The documentation does tell you how to do all the necessary, but it is far from trivial. What you believe might make the effort worthwhile?

[flyingllama87]

I think it's useful as it's a handy tool for IT techs (i.e. me, today :P). There are generally a few times a year as an IT tech where the ability to either extract or convert OST information would make life easier. There are many commercial solutions out there which shows there is a market for it. No one has made a useful free tool for it though & it's understandable from the sounds of it.

[catprisbrey]

Haha, I agree with flyingllama87, I found your XstReader project trying to find a way to convert an OST into just about ANY other format. My need is to rebuild a contact list from an old OST. I'm wondering how possible it'd be to take your project a step further to parse out to a CSV even if it's just a few contact fields (specifically the description "Guid: PSETID_Address Name:Email1OriginalDisplayName" which seems to hold the majority of the addresses in the address books I'm working with).

This program is very impressive though. Thanks for all your hard work!

[Lucent]

It's truly amazing how heavily spammed commercial OST to PST conversion tools are. Even on GitHub, if you search for it you'll find fake repositories containing nothing more than READMEs with links to commercial solutions. It was actually very hard for me to find your tool. Just requesting donations, you'd corner the market. You wouldn't even need to write out the complex PST format. Something like folders with .mbox files could be imported with minimal effort to recreate a PST.

[Dijji]

pemguin005, I have just responded to a similar idea on Issue #5, proposing to add a feature to export properties as CSV files. Would this meet your needs? If so, please respond on that issue.

Lucent, I completely agree about the sales tactics employed by many email conversion vendors. It reminds me of old carnival barkers: ‘see the bearded lady for free’, well part of her leg, anyway. However, full conversion between formats is beyond the current intent of my project, and it’s difficult to see a common base format to output to beyond the CSV files mentioned above.

Dijji

[iluvadev]

Hi, I know this is an old issue.
I'm mantaining this project in my fork and I made a new release of XstReader with the ability to export messages in Outlook's .msg format

https://github.com/iluvadev/XstReader