MS Outlook circumvention in favor of Gnus?

[Johnny <yggdrasil@gmx.co.uk>]

Dear list members,

In short, how does one avoid using Outlook, despite being forced to
send and receive mails through it?

A bit longer:

So comes the dilemma working for a monolithic non-IT company stuck on MS
products forcing all employees into the Outlook email client! I spent
the entire day trying to make it behave reasonably, but even simple
threading is impossible to accomplish as all emails with the same
subject line is considered a thread! Not to mention splitting, scoring
and linking from org-mode... or any other useful customisation. In
return, I get all those little boxes to click on in obscure
menus, /very/ helpful...

While it is out of the question to get a custom email client installed,
I am wondering if there anyone on the list know good workarounds to
ideally get mail dynamically into Gnus?

I am thinking something like making Outlook automatically dump all mails
in a local mailbox on receipt and then read it locally by
Gnus. Unfortunately it seems .pst files are the only options and it
doesn't seem this can be directly accessed by Gnus... 

I am stuck with Windows XP and Outlook 2003, but believe installing
emacs 23.3 with Gnus 5.13 should be possible.

Any ideas and workarounds greatly appreciated!


-- 
Johnny