Microsoft Opening-up Outlook (.PST) Format

If you’ve ever been an Outlook / Microsoft Exchange user, you’ve valued many of the features of the .PST file format. Microsoft has had a winning combination for years with these products which allows everything from easy back-up and restore of your mail files as well as access to your e-mail via a variety of devices in a common experience.

Now, Microsoft has announced that it is making the .PST format available to third-party developers.

“This documentation is still in its early stages and work is ongoing. We are engaging directly with industry experts and interested customers to gather feedback on the quality of the technical documentation to ensure that it is clear and useful,” Paul Lorimer, group manager of Microsoft Office Interoperability wrote in a blog post. “When it is complete, it will be released under our Open Specification Promise, which will allow anyone to implement the .pst file format on any platform and in any tool, without concerns about patents, and without the need to contact Microsoft in any way.”

I personally rent my own exchange server for $8/month in order to avoid using yahoo, google or the other webmail services. While Google has gotten good at aggregating multiple e-mail accounts (one reason why I went this way), it doesn’t provide an easy to implement way to work with outlook and to leave the mail on the server but still have a working backup. Wouldn’t surprise me if either Google itself, or a 3rd party developed some applications using the format to allow for this!