In the past year, I have built a PST viewer that lets you analyze, visualize, and search multiple PST files.

The project was born from the issues that archivists in France face when dealing with Outlook mailboxes (PST files). In public administration, archivists must collect office data (mostly from Microsoft products) generated during administrative operations. This data will be used by researchers in the future to document and report how public administration works and what the decision-making process was. A lot of information is conveyed through emails, and in most French administrations, they use Outlook. Therefore, archivists must collect and handle PST files but lack proper tools. To work with and analyze PST files, they can only use Outlook, which is slow and cumbersome given the size of the PST files and the limited power of their computers.

My application is called Pesto, and it can be tried for free here: https://pestoviewer.com/.

I wanted to provide the best performance possible for archivists. Pesto is designed to work with PST files of any size (tens of gigabytes) and on low-budget office laptops. To achieve this, I chose Rust for its performance (and also because I wanted to learn and practice Rust). The main challenge was implementing the PST specification in Rust to read and exploit the files effectively.

For the curious, the stack is: Rust, Tauri, Tokio, Serde, TypeScript, React, Vite, and Axum for the website.

I have been in contact with archivists from the main French ministries. There has been some word-of-mouth interest and weak signals, but adoption has been slow, and I can’t make a living from it yet.

So I am looking for an opportunity to work with small, motivated, user-centric teams. If you’re interested, I’d be happy to meet for coffee in Paris.

Have fun with Pesto.

Jean-Baptiste Assouad Creator of Pesto https://jeanbaptisteassouad.com/