Reading an Outlook PST FIle

[BaldPenguin]

My Fellow Monks:

Here is my quandry. I use Spamassassin to filter the mail on my mail server, a mail server that hosts more that just my mail. It works quite well. But those wiley spammers are good at hiding their spam from the likes of SA. I want to use the sa-learn to start teaching my bayesian filter what gets missed. Using outlook, I can automatically mark items as junk, which does it's own learning in outlook. Wanting to share this education with everyone else using the mail server, I would like to create a PERL script that reads my 'Junk Mail' folder in the Outlook PST file and runs those mails against the sa-learn binary.

Has anyone done that before, a quick search on CPAN didn't find anything, likewise my searching skills found minimal solutions here within the monestary.

Any pointers?

[tachyon]

I would suggest this ready rolled, free, with source code, (non Perl) solution: Personal Message Store (PST) Export Utility 1.0. You can export a PST of just the junk mail folder from outlook with File|Export|etc beforehand to separate out the junk.

This gives you the original full headers (probably), newline separated ie in standard *nix format.

[monarch]

Just looking on the 'net I found this link which basically says that the .pst file format is protected, and accessing the files through OLE might be the way to go (with a running instance of Microsoft Outlook).

A perl FAQ (How do I create a new folder in Outlook?) may be a stepping stone..

[bart]

accessing the files through OLE might be the way to go

This question just came up again on the Chatterbox, and looking through CPAN I found a module (by Barbie): Mail::Outlook, which apparently is built on top of Win32::OLE. So you no longer have to start from zero.

[rob_au]

Another option may be LibPST - See http://alioth.debian.org/projects/libpst/.