This is an Overview converter. It extracts the contents of .pst email archives to .eml files.

What it does

Currently, we support Microsoft Outlook .pst files. The converter:

1. Writes stdin to input.pst in the CWD
2. Extracts it, streaming .eml files in multipart/form-data on stdout

To be extra-clear, the output is a MIME multipart message composed of MIME multipart messages:

• Each output .eml file is a message/rfc822. It is usually a MIME multipart message: a sequence of "parts" separated by --RANDOM-BOUNDARY boundaries.
• This program's output is a sequence of .eml files, and that sequence is encoded as multipart/form-data, which is a MIME multipart message separated by --DIFFERENT-RANDOM-BOUNDARY boundaries.

Outlook doesn't store messages as they were received, so this converter does both MIME encodings. The output may look something like:

HTTP message
╟─001.eml
║ ╟─body, encoded as text/plain
║ ╟─body, encoded as text/html
║ ╟─body, encoded as application/rtf
║ ╟─attachment1.doc
║ ╙─attachment2.pdf
╟─002.eml
║ ╟─body, encoded as text/plain
║ ╟─body, encoded as text/html
║ ╟─body, encoded as application/rtf
║ ╙─attachment3.pdf
╟─003.eml
║ ╙─body, encoded as text/plain
...

PST files store messages in a proprietary format. This converter encodes each as a message/rfc822 message.

Usage

In an Overview cluster, you'll want to use the Docker container:

docker run -e POLL_URL=http://worker-url:9032/Pst overview/overview-convert-pst:0.0.1

Developing

./dev will connect to the overviewserver_default network and run with POLL_URL=http://overview-worker:9032/Pst.

docker build . will run tests.

To run valgrind:

1. Edit Makefile to enable debugging (just change which lines are commented)
2. docker build . and find the latest working Docker image ID
3. docker run -it --rm --privileged IMAGE_ID
4. cd test/test-XXX
5. apk add --update gdb valgrind
6. To debug a crash: gdb --args /app/extract-pst MIME-BOUNDARY '{"filename":"FILENAME","foo":"bar"}'
7. To check for memory leaks: valgrind /app/extract-pst MIME-BOUNDARY '{"filename":"FILENAME","foo":"bar"}'

Design decisions

src/extract-pst.c is in C. That's because we rely on libpst to do the extraction: its Python wrapper is long obsolete and its readpst executable doesn't do streaming or progress reports.

This extractor output is simple: .eml files. That's because:

• Overview's .eml converter can be reused to convert eml and mbox files.
• Overview can let users download the individual .eml files to open them in virtually any email-related program.
• Overview can convert .eml files in parallel.

License

This software is Copyright 2011-2018 Jonathan Stray, and distributed under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License. See the LICENSE file for details.