If you have Intella, that can do the PDF export for you. Whether it includes attachments is a setting, I think. For a whole PST, you're looking at many, many thousands of pages. Really not the best solution.
Using Intella as it was intended is a much better solution than simply exporting to PDF and searching through PDFs. I bet if you showed the investigators how to use Intella, they would suddenly prefer that over PDFs. You do have to be careful that it's on a computer that's excluded from your internal network as the PST files will be on that computer and you don't want those opened in the investigator's instance of Outlook.
I have been happy with Intella. I got it about 8 months ago--completely out of the blue showed up on my desk. The other C.F. person in the firm ordered it for me without informing me. When I looked at it, I thought it was useless. I can search in EnCase, thank you. But as cases came, I found more and more uses for it and found it was much easier than searching in EnCase. It also helps find relationships between items and people that a strictly-forensic tool like EnCase would have difficulty revealing.
I've got a case now--the one I mentioned--with 170,000 e-mails. Without Intella, finding relevant e-mails would be a bit like looking for a particular piece of hay in a whole hay stack. With Intella, I can have an associate (read: newbie) sit through a quick 4 hour class and turn her loose on the e-mails. She's already turned up some great results. The field personnel are feeding her search terms and she's turning those into intellegent searching and queries and finding results. I couldn't be happier with it, and for the price, it's a no-brainer if you have document or e-mail intensive cases.
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