I've been using Microsoft Outlook to manage my email for a long time now. It works pretty well although the .PST format isn't very good the product is good enough to compensate.

Lately though, I've been contemplating trying out Mutt to see if that would suit me better.

So I decided to convert my PST's to the MBox format and play around with Mutt. It turned out to be a bit of a convoluted process on WinXP so I'm documenting it here.

Step 1:
    Download libpst from http://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/packages/
Step 2:
    Build it using cygwin. I had to set --enable-python=no to get it to compile on my configuration.
Step 3:
    Run readpst <path to pst>. If this step works fine you are done!If not, read on.

Step 4:
    When I ran readpst I got a "Bad System Call" which seemed incomprehensible to me. Finally I found I had to install and start cygserver.
Step 5:
    Set CYGWIN=server (export CYGWIN=server on bash). Now readpst should work fine and export your PST to MBox's.