Outlook PST and DBX mail file support for standard libraries?

[Kevin Altis]

Jon Udell made a blog post today about converting Outlook PST files to
standard formats like MBOX.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/2002/06/28.html#a321

In this case he used Mozilla. There is also a libPST project

http://freshmeat.net/projects/libpst/?topic_id=31

"LibPST provides functions in library form for accessing Outlook's Personal
Folders. Included with this library is a program that will take a PST file
and convert it to an mbox format."

And a libDBX

"LibDBX contains C and a C++ interfaces for accessing Outlook Express dbx
files (the C++ interface is just a wrapper for the C interface). Included
are 2 programs. One will read a dbx file and output the emails in mbox
format to stdout, the other will read the main "folder.dbx" file and export
all the folders into seperate mbox files."

http://freshmeat.net/projects/libdbx/?topic_id=28

Now, I'm not a candidate for the work being out of shape in the C/C++ SWIG
realm, but I'm wondering whether it might be possible to add PST file
support to the Internet Data Handling group of modules

http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/netdata.html

Even if all that was supported was import/export type operations that would
be extremely useful, but if it was actually possible to read and write
contacts, mail, etc. from the PST then that opens up a whole slew of
utilities and applications that would normally have to be done using COM.

Of course, it might be that the licenses for libPST and libDBX would prevent
them getting into the Python distribution.

Just an idea for anyone with the skills to pursue it.

ka