Here’s why its important – a major amount of mail data is stored in PST files today. If all of these millions of mail files were to to be openly accessible by the open source community and/or third party utilities – the possibilities could be endless – I’m talking ZIP endless, ZIP level of ubiquity. I’m sure that would afford Microsoft with a little more ROI than a dead mail client platform.

It seems clear that the application that is Outlook is dying – heck, you could even say to an extent that the MS Office package is dying (or being forced to change). “Cloud” is becoming more pervasive and the lock-in that MS has with Outlook is being eroded daily by cheaper and better mail systems and clients (yes, even the Exchange/OWA is killing Outlook to some extent).

The trick here is the storage platform, Microsoft has created a (somewhat) robust storage platform for mail/calendar/etc data that could be incredibly portable and useful in the futre. Have you ever used “Gmail Backup” or other types of mail archiving utilities? What you get is 6000 .eml files. Not exactly a robust storage solution. Imagine the PST becomes one of the de-facto standard for storing and transporting mail data or archiving this data? I think this is what Microsoft wants.

Currently, PST data is hard to open, easy to move around but useless after being transported and can’t be open directly off a disc. Opening

Kevin (@calwell)

I do know that there has been a lot of griping to MS recently, even among some big institutional adopters of Outlook, about it’s many shortcomings, especially in the cross-platform world. The company that I work for was one of them.

My question would be, how did Apple get what is apparently a pretty good Outlook client in 10.6? Did they license the tech from MS? No announcement was made…

Opening PST up does nothing to make Outlook a platform – you always access a platform through well-defined APIs that can stay constant even when the underlying file format changes. It also does not benefit Microsoft, only people who are writing utilities to migrate away from Outlook to something like Evolution or Thunderbird. Mozilla already has Outlook migration support in Thunderbird, however (probably via the official Microsoft APIs), so this is rather late in the game. In all likelihood this effort was part of the settlement between the EU and Microsoft.

they need to get with the crowd and support POP and IMAP with hotmail.

We in eM Client virtually love this move since it allows us to do fast and seamless migration from Outlook. Even when Outlook is crashed we’ll be able to take .pst from users backup and import it to eM Client (or any other client)

Outlook would be a great platform if opened few years ago -> now it’s rule will be hopefully over with upcoming thin clients or unified messaging clients like eM (http://www.emclient.com)

I’ve written some Python which calls the MAPI and OOM interfaces via the Redemption library (http://www.dimastr.com/redemption/home.htm) and it was a nightmare. This pst opening is a good first step, in the hopes that simpler ways to access knowledge from emails will be developed.

This is why using Microsoft products is so aggravating. Everyone else can use standard MBOX mailbox formats which are not only open but work better.