The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting has released the emails of Governor Jeb Bush during his tenure as Florida’s governor. That’s of interest to us since the information is available in its original Outlook data file form.
Before anyone gets angry with us … we are not making any political comment here nor any statement about the email content. We’re interested in the technical details of Microsoft Outlook data being released in such a large scale and public way.
Over time, these messages will be released in PDF which the FCIR describes as “We’re not saying our system isn’t cumbersome — it’s just a lot less cumbersome than working with the raw data.”
But what’s so cumbersome about dealing with Outlook PST files? It’s not hard for anyone who has Outlook and gives you a lot more searching and sorting options than a PDF version would.
Here’s how to do it:
You can do with any PST file, not just the Governors. It’s a common need when recovering old Outlook content.
Go to the Email Archive page and download PST file/s.
They don’t say what version of Outlook was used to make the PST’s and it may be different versions and different PST formats over the 1999-2006 period. Microsoft significantly changed the PST file format without changing the file extension. Certainly Outlook 2007 or later will be able to handle whatever type of PST file it is.
Start Outlook and go to File | Open & Export (Outlook 2010: Open) | Open Outlook Data File.
Outlook 2007 and before … File | Open | Outlook Data File …
The PST will appear in the Outlook folder list.
You can start looking through the messages and sort into different orders.
But to do more is frustrating. The next step is to wait … wait until Windows has indexed the new PST so you can search the contents. Microsoft has stubbornly refused to improve the indexing service to allow for faster or high priority indexing.
Long ago Office-Watch.com explained how to make indexing run faster to catch up with the arrival of many new items. It’s clumsy but all Microsoft will let us have.
Once indexing is complete, you can fully search the messages and attachments.
We opened one small PST (a mere 48MB) and this is what we found:
All the messages in a single folder. It’s a mix of messages to and from the former Governor.
To help make sense of all these messages, you might want to split them into their original Inbox and Sent Items folders. Do that by making new folders (in the same PST or another one) and move the messages to their respective folders. Sort the messages by Sender … any with ‘Jeb Bush’ as sender go to the ‘Sent Items’ folder and the rest go to the ‘Inbox’ folder.
In the above example, you can also see that messages are grouped by Outlook according to ‘Conversation’ aka thread or subject line.
The downloadable PST files may have duplicate items since it’s not clear if the larger downloads contain the smaller PST’s too. For example, there’s a 2003.pst which looks like the complete 2003 collection then ‘…+New’ and …+Public’ PST’s as well for the same year.
Keep that in mind if you decide to make your owned combined PST with messages over a longer period of time. You can search the combined messages more easily than switching between separate Outlook data stores. To do that, make a new, empty, PST then copy the contents of the downloaded PST’s into the new one. Once Windows indexing has caught up you can search the new combined PST too.
This isn’t the first time Outlook data files have been used to move messages around. Years ago Office-Watch.com showed how astronauts got their email on the shuttle or space station.
