Outlook Email Parser

A Python tool for parsing Outlook email files (.olm) and extracting email content, including subject, sender, body, and attachments.

Introduction

Have you ever had a large *.olm email backup archive (the only back up you had) go corrupt as in nothing else can repair the *.olm structure. (and you just want to salvage data)

All because out of curiosity, you decided to inspect the exported backup contents, looking to see if you got all the accounts?

Oh Pehaps you changed the .olm file extension to .zip (to confirm payload, accounts etc) , once sastified with the contents, you renamed the extention back to .olm. (somehow corrupted the file)

This project provides a simple and efficient way to parse Outlook email ('.xml') files from .olm and extract the email content.

The tool uses Python's built-in xml.etree.ElementTree library to parse the XML structure of the email file and extract the relevant information.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

• Python 3.6 or later
• No external dependencies required

Installation

1. Clone this repository using git clone https://github.com/SipTech/extract_olm_data_to_eml.git
2. Navigate to the project directory using cd extract_olm_data_to_eml
3. Run the tool using python parse_xml_to_email.py

Usage

To Salvage data from a corrupt (.olm) backup:

1. Rename the corrupt backup file's file extenstion to .zip (makes it a regular directory you can browse)
2. Place the backup file (.zip) in the project's root directory or any external disk as path i.e /volume/myDrive/Microsoft_Outlook_backup.zip or /<mnt|media>/myDrive/Microsoft_Outlook_backup.zip as your zip_file_path.
3. Provide the output directory to hold the resulting .eml files i.e /volume/myDrive/Microsoft_Outlook_EML_EXTRACT or /<mnt|media>/myDrive/Microsoft_Outlook_EML_EXTRACT as your output_dir. (will be created if not exist)
4. Run the script using python3 extract.py <zip_file_path> <output_dir>
5. The tool will extract all email content recursively and save it to a new file with the same name as the original files, but with a .eml extension

Example Output

The tool will output a new file with the same name as the original file, but with a .eml extension. For example, if the original file is named message_03349.xml, the output file will be named message_03349.eml.

Troubleshooting

• Make sure to 1st change the corrupt Outlook's file extention from ".olm" to ".zip" (this turns it into regular zip archive)
• Check the console output for any error messages

Contributing

This project is open-source and welcomes contributions from the community. If you'd like to contribute, please fork this repository and submit a pull request with your changes.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more information.