Outlook 2000 bulk exporter

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Warning upfront

This is the apex of spaghetti code. Its poorly designed and needs a lot of TLC. So why am I releasing this? Well, because you might find this useful to just use. Or you might even hack this a bit yourself!! :)

What it does

It opens your default Outlook2k profile and dumps the item types you select to a directory. I assume Outlook will ask you for a default profile if you don't have one, but I haven't tested this.

How to use it

1. Check the item types you want to export
2. Select a directory to export to.
3. Click export button

Why I did it

I have been spending most of my time in linux, and booting into win2k just to get access to my PIM data, e.g. outlook. This sucked. Since MS insists on entrapping you by providing decent import abilities but abysmal export features, I needed to hack this thing up so I could get out.

My strategy to escape Outlook.

1. Deal with calendar (tasks/appointments)
2. Deal with contacts
3. Deal with email store

Take all my appointments and dump each one to disk in iCAL format. This required me to read rfc[2445] and spend many wonderful hours figuring that out. Then I had to take all my contacts and dump in vCard, rfc[2426], which was surprisingly easy.

The biggest issue was all my email (500MB PST file). I didn't want to hack an mbox interface, and I didn't want to link with mozilla's xpcom for a simple export util. My solution?  Setup an IMAP server on my spare linux box and copy all my email folders to an account there.

I used qmail  and courrier-imap. READ:  Life with qmail or Qmail Tutorial on linux.com. This had the benefit that I didn't have to deal with attachments, a concern since that meant yet another RFC. Besides, it only took a few minutes instead of the hours an mbox interface would have taken.

The Code you should read:

1. buildercal.cpp BuildCalendar::Build()
2. buildercontact.cpp BuildContact::Build()

Everything else is typical boring MFC <-- fruit of the devil.

Limitations

• It doesn't deal with journal items at all.
• Todo/Task list is not handled at all
• It dumps Note items as text
• No profile support yet, it uses default profile.

Multiline body/comments in appointments/tasks are whacked. There is no way to take a bunch of lines and insert them into iCAL/vCard. So the solution was to replace all \r\n with \\. Now everything is on one line but it looks nasty. Better than losing data I suppose.

Binary data/attachments are not handled at all, period. If its not text native to the item, it doesn't go anywhere. When I wrote this, olexp was not doing line folding/unfolding

Plans that I have

None, absolutely none.

If you want to improve on this, possibly use the BuildCalendar/Contact::Build() as a base for a decent export COMAddin, feel free. In fact I think you really really should. :)