I'm all for splitting a task into more manageable pieces where convenient: 1. readpst will convert your PST into a mbox-compatible structure 2a. there's plent

I'm all for splitting a task into more manageable pieces where convenient: 1. readpst will convert your PST into a mbox-compatible structure 2a. there's plenty of tools to search that (e.g. Mozilla Thunderbird) 2b. in the past, I've used "readpst -M" to just generate a set of files, and then "grep -HIrn" to search for a string, no further tools needed; you may want to look at more sophisticated approaches. This has the advantage that all processing is local, and you're not exposing your data to some hopefully-benevolent cloud entity.