I used to be a Windows PC guy, and so used Microsoft Outlook for email. About 5 years ago, I saw the errors of my ways, repented, and switched to the one true computing platform. After making the switch, I proceeded to back up my important PC stuff — like emails and documents — to CD archives, and tucked them away in my closet to collect dust.

Recently however, I came across a need to extract and read some of those old emails I had backed up. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do this on a Mac, since the emails are stored in Outlook’s proprietary PST file format, and I didn’t have access to a PC. Fortunately, someone wrote an open source utility to extract emails from such PST files, and this utility runs on any POSIX-compliant Unix system (i.e. Linux, and more importantly, Mac OS X). So if you find yourself in a similar situation, fire up Terminal and get ready to do some command-line hacking.

The utility you need is libpst, which includes readpst — a command-line tool that converts PST files into standard .mbox format, which can then be imported into Apple Mail or Thunderbird.

Steps (Mac OS X):

1. Install Homebrew if you haven’t already
2. Run: brew install libpst
3. Convert your PST file: readpst -o ~/Desktop/mail_export yourfile.pst
4. This creates .mbox files in the output folder
5. In Apple Mail, go to File → Import Mailboxes and select the .mbox files
6. Done!

This worked perfectly for me on Tiger. Your mileage may vary depending on the version of Outlook that created the PST file.

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