Outlook Reaper

Outlook Reaper is a smallish Python script that will pull out a folder of email messages from Outlook as a Unix-style mbox. It has a number of problems, listed below, but if they don't bother you too much it might be helpful. The way it works is based on a previous script I found, which has useful setup information in terms of getting Python and COM talking together.

Using it is pretty simple: run the script, navigate through your Outlook folders, and then extract into the filename you gave on the command line. So something like the following (your input in red).

C:\> outlook_reaper.py out.mbox
------------------------------------------------------------
[Root]
0 Personal Folders
Select number of [E]xtract [Q]uit, followed by <Return>
0
------------------------------------------------------------
Personal Folders
0 Deleted Items
1 Inbox
2 Outbox
3 Sent Items
4 Calendar
5 Contacts
6 Journal
7 Notes
8 Tasks
9 Drafts
10 RSS Feeds
11 Junk E-mail
Select number of [E]xtract [Q]uit, followed by <Return>
1
------------------------------------------------------------
Inbox
Select number of [E]xtract [Q]uit, followed by <Return>
e
Extracting to out.mbox

Patches welcome; while I'm unlikely to need this in future, building on this and keeping it in the same place will probably seed better in search engines and avoid the meandering paths I took while searching for a similar utility.