EML versus PST in e-mail programs

Posted by Graham Rhind
Aug 4, 2011 at 11:00 AM

I know this is a little off topic, but I’d like to tap the intellects (excuse the upcoming pun!) of the OutlinerSoftware readers concerning e-mail formats.

After Stephen’s mention of Intellect I’ve started testing it again (I used to be an avid Time and Chaos user many years ago). I see that some of the irritants that used to bug me then are still in there (e.g. creation of all recurring tasks at one time rather than when previous occurrence is done, also meaning that all recurring tasks have to have an end date; no undated tasks allowed etc.). But one if its greatest features is the ability to run on a USB stick, which could be a great boon.

Outlook uses .pst files and Intellect .eml files to store its e-mails. A couple of questions which I can’t find answers to elsewhere:

- does using thousands of separate .eml files (one for each e-mail) make a program using them faster or slower than a program (i.e. Outlook) using a single (large) .pst file?
- what are the security implications of using .eml files? I.e. I imagine that if my computer was hacked into people could open the .pst file or the .eml files to read their contents, but my gut feeling is that the .pst file is better protected. Is that a correct assumption?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Graham