Microsoft opening up the Outlook email database (PST files) file format

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/26/microsoft-opens-up-the-pst-format.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/interoperability/archive/2009/10/26/roadmap-for-outlook-personal-folders-pst-documentation.aspx

If I remember correctly, up until now you couldn’t do much with a PST no matter what API you used, unless Outlook was actually installed. Now you will be able to, which is great. I have many Gigs of email going back to 1995, all in PST format. I’d love to have or create some better (more targeted) tools to work with those archives, which usually comes down to looking for some old email for record purposes, like a needle in a hay stack.

This is not to say that there weren’t some very useful APIs already open for MAPI and accessing MAPI data using database APIs.

I remember reading somewhere that the PST format was based on MS Access. I assume the change on 2002-2003 to the format was to move it to something like the personal SQL Server db to beat the 2Gig filesize limit.