Working with PST files in Linux

I recently started working with PST files in linux - building a searchable mailbox archive from old PST files backed up from various mailboxes. In this project you will find scripts which i've used to help speed up some of the tasks needed to convert the PST files into easy use data.

Getting Started

First of all, you will need to install the following:

libpst4;xxxxx - xxxxx will be i386 or amd64 pst-utils readpst

On debian systems they can be installed like so:

sudo apt install pst-utils

to_eml.sh

This cycles through all your .pst files, and will convert each email to a .eml file in it's respective directory. You may end up with a structure like this:

export/Archive/Inbox/*.eml
export/Archive/Folder 1/*.eml
export/Archive/Sent Items/*.eml
export/Archive/Deleted Items/*.eml

Use the script as following:

Put it in the directory with your PST files
bash to_eml.sh
let it run

md5_rename.sh

This script renames your eml files in all the various directories to have a unique name by renaming it to it's md5 hash value. when it finds an eml file, it does md5sum on the file, then renames the file to hash.eml

This will be useful later when we want to de-duplicate any emails before we add them into a database.

find_dupes.sh

This script will show the duplicate files.

Author Notes