Extract Subfiles from Outlook Personal Folders Files

KeyView can extract Outlook items such as messages, appointments, contacts, tasks, notes, and journal entries from a PST file. When a PST file is extracted to disk, the body text and header information (To, From, Sent, and so on) from each Outlook item are extracted to a text file. (If you do not want the header information to appear in the text file, see Exclude Metadata from the Extracted Text File.)

You can also extract messages from PST files as MSG files, including all their attachments, using the SaveAsMSG property in the ExtractSubFileExtractConfig class.

If an Outlook item contains a non-mail attachment, the attachment is extracted in its native format to a sub directory. If an Outlook item contains an Outlook attachment, the attached item's body text and attachment(s) are extracted to a sub directory.

NOTE: The Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (PST) readers are an advanced feature and are sold and licensed separately. To enable these readers in a KeyView SDK, you must obtain an appropriate license key from Micro Focus. For information about adding a new license key to an existing installation, see Pass License Information to KeyView.

Choose the Reader to use for PST Files

KeyView provides several ways of processing PST files:

On Windows, the MAPI-based reader is used by default but you can choose pstxsr if you prefer. On non-Windows platforms, only one of the native readers is available.

The differences between the readers are summarized in the following table.

Feature Native Reader (pstxsr) Native Reader (pstnsr) MAPI-based Reader (pstsr)
Platforms supported Windows x86 and x64
Linux x64 and AArch64
All platforms not supported by pstxsr Windows x86 and x64
Outlook required No No Yes
MAPI properties supported Yes. All properties defined in mapitags.h. Object properties are not supported.
Password protection supported Yes Yes Yes (using KVCredential structure)
Compressible encryption supported Yes Yes Yes
High encryption supported No No Yes

To change the reader used to process PST files, change the PST entry (file category value 297) in the formats.ini file. For example, to use pstxsr:

297=pstx

NOTE: You must make sure that the PST that you are extracting is not open in the Outlook client, and that the Outlook process is not running.

NOTE: When extracting subfiles from PST files, information on the distribution list used in an email is extracted to a file called emailname.dist. This applies to the MAPI reader (pstsr) only.

System Requirements

MAPI is supported on Windows platforms only and relies on functionality in Outlook. If you want to use the MAPI-based reader, pstsr, Microsoft Outlook must be installed on the same machine as your application. Outlook must also be the default email application. KeyView supports the following PST formats and Outlook clients: