Postby jch » Tue Jan 16, 2007 1:08 pm
There isn't actually a "standard" format for storing mail messages, there are some common formats like the mbox and one-message-per-file format, but nothing that's actually standard. It's basically to do with performance and functionality.
That doesn't help you though.
The easiest way to extract messages from the message store in a format usable by other programs is to extract them using IMAP. There are IMAP client tools in python, perl and java and lots of other programming languages. Google will almost certainly find something that's useful to you.
jch