For quite some time I have been wanting to get my ~ 1GB worth of email archives out of Outlook’s proprietary format, with an eye towards eventually moving off of Outlook completely, but the process hasn’t been easy. I’ve tried several tools for importing Outlook mail into mbox/mbx format but all have barfed on my largest PST file (~ 650MB).
Many months ago, Les Orchard suggested that IMAP + Fetchmail might be the best solution for me. Migrating my archives would be as simple as “Drag-n-Drop” within Outlook and, as a bonus, I could keep running Outlook against the IMAP store until I was comfortable switching to something else.
The problem with that solution: the lack of free IMAP servers for Windows that are robust and full-featured. I would need to build my solution on a Unix-ish OS, and that gave me great pause. I know enough about Linux, *BSD, and Irix to be dangerous. Extremely dangerous. Entrusting my important data to a Unix system administered by myself seemed like a less-than-brilliant idea, reminding me of a lawyer representing themself…
But I’ve started warming up to the concept. A couple of months ago I put CVS on my Debian box and starting using it to manage all of my source code. My recent rebuild and botched kernel upgrade have me convinced that I can identify my important data, backup and restore it, and recover from “catastrophic” boot failures. I’ve migrated my broadband connection over to the Debian box, I’ll probably give MythTV a shot in a few days.
I’m becoming comfortable with Linux system administration.
So the process of migrating my mail has begun: IMAP is up and running, Outlook is (very slowly) copying my archives. I’ve tweaked sendmail on my web hosting account to add X-Envelope-To headers, I’ve got Fetchmail installed but not yet configured, and I still need to figure out how all of the “virtual domain” stuff works in Exim.
Almost there…
