I’m dealing with an old Outlook PST archive and need to move the mail into an MBOX-compatible environment. The frustrating part is that Outlook doesn’t provide a direct PST-to-MBOX export route, which makes the process more complicated than I expected.

I started looking at dedicated PST converters, and DRS Softech’s PST File Converter  caught my attention because it can work without requiring Outlook to be installed. That seems useful when you’re handling an old archive on a machine where Outlook isn’t available.

What I also like is the ability to preview the PST before converting it. For a large archive, being able to browse folders, emails, attachments, contacts, calendars, and other items first could prevent exporting the wrong data. The tool also supports selective conversion, so I wouldn’t necessarily have to process the entire mailbox.

For the actual export, it supports MBOX as well as EML, MSG, PDF, CSV, and several other formats. It also claims to preserve folder hierarchy, metadata, and attachments during conversion.

Has anyone here used a standalone PST converter for this kind of migration? I’m particularly interested in how well the folder structure and attachments survive when moving PST data to MBOX.