Moved the very last message from Outlook’s perverted .pst files to the IMAP(Internet Message Access Protocol) server I setup. Finally I am totally rid of Microsoft’s Office suite. Outlook I was tied to because of a ton of old email’s that I do sometimes use and need access to. The were all store in the proprietary format Microsoft uses in their .pst files, and I could never find a suitably strong enough program to import and translate those files including sub-folders and attachments.
Fed up at last with the upgrade price of Office 2003, I set up an IMAP server on the internal network. I now have almost 2.75 GB(Gigabytes) of space back on my drive from removing office and those bloated Microsoft message stores. The exact same e-mails that took up 2.25GB are taking up less than 600 MB(MegaBytes) on the IMAP server. Does that make sense? Yes, I checked that the message counts matched and spot checked messages all throughout the files, ditto attachments. Everything is there, it just not stored in a bloated fashion.
I still haven’t settled on a new email client. I am grabbing the latest Thunderbird weekly right now, and I will be looking into Mozilla as well. Right now I am just reveling in un-chained freedom—ok maybe that’s a bit much, but still…
Edit (Aug 2006): For those seeking a replacement to the libpst based ol2mbox — now a dead project — for converting Outlook pst message stores to mbox format, I discovered a program called ReadPST (scroll down to “Mailbox Conversion”) while looking for the easiest way to move old messages to Gmail. No guarantees…I’ve not used it, but I get a lot of visits from people looking to convert outlook PST to mBox….
