10.4: Another way to move mail from PC Outlook to Mail

Jul 25, '05 08:49:00AM

Contributed by: strad43

Tiger only hintI noticed that a lot of people are having problems trying to move their mail messages from their PCs to the Mail application on the Mac. There are software applications you can buy to do this, as well as strange, very dense procedures you can follow for free. Here's a way I got it to work, which is somewhat tedious, but not very difficult.

To do this, you will need Entourage and be running Tiger and Mail 2.0.

  1. On your PC, drag any messages you wish to transfer from your inbox on Outlook/Outlook Express to a regular local folder (on your desktop, for instance). If you have multiple folders that you would like to transfer, create a separate folder and repeat this process for each one. Each message will appear as a .eml file in these folders. (If you drag a lot of messages at once, there is a risk of freezing the program. If this happens, just drag smaller groups of files.)
  2. Via network or however you wish, transfer your new folders with the .eml files to your Mac.
  3. Open Entourage. Start with a clean, empty inbox (make a new identity if you need to). Open one of the folders you have just transferred from your PC. Select all the messages in it and drag them into the Entourage inbox. If there are a lot of messages, Entourage may appear to lock up for a few minutes, but let it work. What ends up happening is it creates a separate folder in your inbox for each message (weird, I know, but bear with me).
  4. Open the Mail application. Go to File -> Import. Select Entourage. It will give you an option to select all of the folders that were just created in Entourage (that contain one message each). Select all of them. It will import all of these folders into Mail.
  5. To get the messages out of those individual folders and into one single folder, the best way is to use a Smart Folder to find them all. Set up a Smart Folder to find all messages that are not in your inbox or any of the other folders that you may already be using in Mail. It will then logically find all of the messages that you just imported. Drag the messages from your Smart Folder into whichever folder you wish. You can then trash the Import folder, since it will just contain a bunch of empty subfolders.
  6. Repeat steps three to five for all of the folders that came from your PC with the .eml files. Always start with a clean identity on Entourage -- otherwise, you will run into problems when trying to keep your folders separate during the Mail import process.
Good luck!

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