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Migrating from Windows Outlook to OSX Mail.app

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I’ve encouraged a friend of mine to move to Mac. He bought a Powerbook 15in, iBook 14in, two iPods, Airport, Airport Express…. the works really. He’d been running Outlook as his email client on Windows against a pop3 server, and had all of his email stored on his local machine.

After a bit of rudimentary research I learned the following process:

  • Install Eudora
  • Import from Outlook using Eudora
  • Move the Eudora mbox files to the Mac
  • Import using Mail.app (which can “habla” mbox)

    • Well, that didn’t work (but did consume many hours with import/export fun). It “almost” worked, but the html email looked like crap, and attachments were mangled.

    So, I googled some more and constructed a Byzantine process involving Windows Outlook and Outlook Express, dbxConv and Mail.app. All I can say is, “it worked for me”:

  • On your Windows machine import your email to Outlook Express
  • Find the .dbx files that Outlook Express creates (I can’t remember where it put these)
  • Drop this program dbxConv into the same folder as your .dbx files and run it using *.dbx as the second parameter.
  • Connect to your Windows machine using the Mac (cmd+k from the Finder) and drop your .mbx files somewhere temporary
  • Import the .mbx files into Mail.app using the “Import Mailboxes” command
  • Curse because the process is so complicated, then drink something to celebrate

    • Written by jthurber

    October 18th, 2004 at 1:31 pm

    Posted in programming

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