Parsing PST and OST mailboxes
Recipe Difficulty: Hard
Python Version: 2.7
Operating System: Linux
The Personal Storage Table (PST) file is commonly found on many systems and provides access to archived email. These files, generally associated with the Outlook application, contain message and attachment data. These files are commonly found in the corporate setting, as many business environments continue to leverage Outlook for internal and external email management.
Getting started
This recipe requires the installation of the libpff
, and its Python bindings, pypff
, to function. Available on GitHub, this library provides tools, and Python bindings, to handle and extract data from PST files. We will set up this library in Ubuntu 16.04 with bindings for Python 2 for ease of development. This library can be built for Python 3 as well, though we will use the Python 2 bindings for this section.
We must install a number of dependencies before installing the required library. Using the Ubuntu apt
package...