Martin Brooks

Martin Brooks joined PCDOTS in 2014 after seven years building enterprise email migration tooling at a managed services firm in London. He now leads the engineering team responsible for the company's email conversion, backup, and recovery products. These tools are used daily by IT departments at financial institutions, law firms, healthcare organizations, and government agencies.

His engineering work focuses on the unglamorous but critical problem of extracting structured data from broken systems: corrupted PST files from decommissioned Exchange servers, orphaned MBOX archives from old Thunderbird installations, OLM exports from retired Apple Mail accounts, and the hundreds of edge cases that occur when email data has lived through multiple migrations.

Outside of PCDOTS, Martin contributes to open-source email parsing libraries, advises on email-related digital forensics cases, and occasionally writes about email format internals. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh and is a member of the British Computer Society.

Why this matters for the products you use

Email files are notoriously fragile. PST files are an undocumented Microsoft binary format that breaks in subtle ways. MBOX files have at least four incompatible variants (mboxo, mboxrd, mboxcl, mboxcl2). OLM archives use a structure unique to Apple Mail's macOS implementation. Most tools handle the common case and fail silently on edge cases like corrupted headers, mixed encodings, and embedded attachments with malformed MIME boundaries.

The PCDOTS engine, which Martin's team has refined across nine major releases since 2018, is built specifically for the worst-case mailbox: files with mixed encodings, partial corruption, non-standard folder structures, and decades of legacy formatting decisions. When you read claims about "lossless conversion" on PCDOTS product pages, those claims trace back to the test suite Martin's team maintains with over 8,000 real-world malformed sample files.