I am currently in the process of moving to a Mac at work (yes!) and my main concern in the switch was moving all my email from Outlook. If you don’t know already (though you might expect) Outlook uses a proprietary format called .PST. There is no obvious way to just migrate the messages and your folders to another system… at least on the surface. Turns out there are actually a few ways, but by far the easiest was this simple guide at Riches Communications.
The basics are as follows…
- Install Mozilla (Full version with email) or Thunderbird on your PC.
- Import Mail from Outlook (Tools / Import)
- On my machine this took about 30 minutes. I have a few GB of email with plenty of attachments included courtesy of a boatload of work projects.
- Mozilla uses the standard .mbox format which can then easily be imported into the email program of your choice. I actually have to use Entourage, though this absolutely works in Mail.app and certainly Thunderbird (which probably does not require the renaming). Entourage incidentally uses a proprietary message store as well, but can at least handle the standards on import.
As I mentioned I had a lot of mail so this took a while as you have to repeat the import loop for each folder and you can only import one at a time. Other than time and the manual nature of this process it’s actually quite painless and totally works. I imported all my mail to my personal PowerBook at home and burned the mail database to a DVD so I can easily import it today on my new machine at the office.
I think it’s interesting to note that you can’t actually import your mail (with all your folders) into Outlook Express! It will import some of your mail – actually just the inbox which leaves you hanging since most people do not maintain all their mail in a single folder.
technorati tags: Outlook, Entourage, .PST, Mail.app, Thunderbird, Mozilla, email
Well, I think you should always have up to date email backups. I used to do it manually by saving the .dbx files, until I found http://www.amicutilities.com/outlook-express-backup/ – Outlook Express Backup Genie that does it automatically at regular times.
I choused it over other because it can work with both MS Outlook and Outlook Express
Alicia
I LOVE YOU!!!! It works PERFECTLY!!
Happy to be of service!
You can just drag emails from the Outlook folder to the Windows folder and then to any email program.
You can just drag emails from the Outlook folder to the Windows folder and then to any email program.