Reading Microsoft Outlook Express .dbx files

[Greg Jorgensen]

"Steve Holden" <sholden at holdenweb.com> wrote in message
news:h7_66.8949$X3.91000 at e420r-atl1.usenetserver.com...
> In my trek through the various mail packages the Windoze user may be
> confronted with I am currently battling with Outlook Express.  It's
actually
> rather better than I feared.
>
> Its native folder format appears to be a ".dbx" file, about which I have
no
> information.  Does any reader have experience with either reading these
> files, or automating OEx to provide them to a Python program in
RFC822-style
> formats?

I think the .dbx format is documented somewhere on MSDN. A few months ago I
was trying to save an Outlook Express mailbox as separate messages, and
after digging around with Google and DejaNews I found a couple of free tools
that did just that. They weren't very stable, though: one didn't seem to
work at all, and the other stopped processing messages halfway through the
mailbox. In the source code of one of them (I can't remember names, sorry)
the .dbx format was obvious. There's also a C library for Unix out there
that reads .dbx files, but I didn't play with that.

In the end I did the slacker thing: I used Outlook (not Express) to import
the .dbx file. Outlook can save a bunch of selected messages as individual
text files, which is what I wanted.

--
Greg Jorgensen
PDXperts
Portland, Oregon, USA
gregj at pobox.com