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Is somebody able to help me? I use MS-OUTLOOK 2010 under Windows 7 and I would like to use contacts and appointments saved in Outlook in Evolution 3.2.2. too. Therefore I installed „readpst“ from the Ubuntu Software-Center and I used it equal to the todo on the Ubuntu-homepage: Import PST in Evolution 3.2.1

At first sight contacts and appointments are transfered acceptably. But on closer inspection it appears that my contacts which have birthday before 1st of January 1970 their birthdays are fixed on 01.01.1970. Because the most of my contacts are older than 43 years hardly any Birthday is false. That is not acceptable for me.

Is there any other way to import PST-Data into Evolution?

Many thanks for your assistance.

Best regards Dietmar

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Dietmar Bimmerlein
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1 Answers1

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Have you tried importing the pst file directly through Evolution? Evolution 3.2.2 should be able to import pst files directly. This function should be available in package 3.2.2-0ubuntu2 and later.

Evolution >> File >> Import

In the Evolution Import Assistant, chose Import a single file under Importer Type. After that, you can specify the file name and the file type (.pst).

The catch is that the Evolution plug-ins use the same libpst4 library to perform the import that readpst uses. Dates before Jan 1, 1970 are more likely to have problems converting. I would guess that birthdays are probably the only dates you have in your pst file that go back that far, so that's where you see the conversion problem.

The Evolution plug-in, however, converts dates with a different method than readpst does and appears to correctly handle the conversion of dates from a Windows format to a Unix format.

I suspect you are running into 1 of 2 possible problems:

1) Date format. If you are using DD/MM, libpst4 doesn't appear to adjust for this (though I could be wrong). The result is that the date conversion fails. If this is the case, you may be able to adjust Outlook (or locale settings) before creating the pst file.

2) 32- vs 64-bit issues. Although libpst4 can read a 64-bit pst file, it uses a structure to store the datetime that does not appear to guarantee (again, I could be wrong) that a 64-bit datetime is converted correctly.

If you try the pst file with Evolution directly and it still doesn't work, and none of this helps you solve the problem, your best option might be using another file format.

You can export the Outlook file as csv, tab, etc and Evolution can also import those files through the Import Assistant.

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