Mail as an archive tool: old Outlook files searched where they lie, and exported for legal hold

A lot of businesses have years of mail in files nobody can easily open any more: a .pst from a laptop that has been replaced, an .olm from a Mac, an mbox exported from an old account. Usually the question arrives at a bad moment, from a lawyer or an auditor, and it is something like “every message from this supplier between these dates”. Rutba Office 1.46 and 1.50 turned Mail into a tool for exactly that.

Archives open where they lie

An Outlook data file (.pst or .ost), an Outlook for Mac archive (.olm) or an mbox opens without being imported. It is listed under Archives and read like a mailbox, and it is never written to; a strip above its list says so. Since 1.50 an mbox or .olm of any size opens, read a piece at a time, and indexing happens on threads of its own, so a large archive no longer holds up the rest of the suite while it is read. A search answers from what is indexed so far and says how far it has got.

One search across everything

The search box searches the open folder or All mail: every account and every open archive together, message bodies included. Each result says which mailbox or archive it lives in, and which folder. It understands the syntax people already type into other mail programs:

from:accounts@supplier.example has:attachment
subject:"purchase order" -from:noreply

There are operators for the sender, recipients, subject, attachment names, unread messages, dates and ranges, size, folder, a minus to leave something out, OR, and quoted phrases. A Search tab offers the same choices from menus for anybody who would rather not type them.

An export you can prove

Export for legal hold writes a search’s results, a folder or several folders to an mbox and to PDFs (one per message, or one file after a summary page), with the attachments beside them if you want them. Alongside goes a manifest in CSV and JSON giving each message’s date, sender, recipients, subject, Message-ID, where it came from, and the SHA-256 hash of what was written. Anybody receiving the export can check that nothing in it has changed since. The sources are only ever read.

Signed and encrypted mail

Since 1.50, a message signed with S/MIME says who signed it and whether it arrived as they sent it, checked on your computer against the certificates Windows trusts. Revocation is not checked, and the message says so. A message signed by somebody other than its sender, or with no sender, or whose certificate has expired, is not shown as good. An encrypted message opens with a certificate and key you import from a .p12 or .pfx file, kept in the system’s protected store, and Compose can sign and encrypt.

Many accounts at once, and nothing looked up behind your back

Add account now takes rows of addresses and passwords, pasted or loaded from a file, sets each one up and reports how each went, which helps anyone moving a whole office. Settings are looked up only when you press Add: first from a table of the large providers, then from the address’s own domain, and never from anybody else’s service. A password goes to a server outside the address’s own domain only after you agree, and never without encryption.