About psttomail

A few years ago I was helping a relative switch away from a costly Microsoft Office subscription. Moving to free alternatives was mostly painless — Thunderbird handled email well, LibreOffice took care of documents — but when it came to migrating the PST files out of Outlook, things ground to a halt.

I went looking for tools to help. The commercial options I found were either expensive, riddled with dark patterns, or required uploading a private email archive to a server somewhere on the internet. None of those felt like good choices. So I spent the better part of a few days cobbling together a solution using command-line tools, Google searches, and no small amount of help from AI — eventually getting there, but with considerably more grey hairs than I started with.

Some time later, a second relative asked me for help with exactly the same problem. Regrettably, I am the family IT expert.

At that point I decided enough was enough. Instead of going through the same painful process again, I sat down and built the tool I wished had existed in the first place: something solid, straightforward, completely offline, and priced like a useful utility rather than enterprise software.

So I give you psttomail, PST to Thunderbird, and PST Viewer. Not the most exciting software in the universe — but it might just save you from smashing the monitor in frustration.

Having lived the problem, I was clear about what these tools had to be:

• Offline. Your email archive is private. It should stay on your own machine — not pass through someone else's server.
• Simple. The people who need to migrate PST files are not usually the people who enjoy command-line tools. The process should take minutes, not days.
• Affordable. A one-time $9.99 licence. No subscription, no annual fee, no upsell.
• Honest. No dark patterns, no artificial limitations in a "free" tier designed to frustrate you into upgrading.

psttomail is a product of Khulan Ltd, a software company founded by Derek McDoon in 2015. Khulan has been building quality business software for over a decade, with a focus on tools that solve real problems cleanly and without unnecessary complexity.