Yesterday I had to Migrate a small home business from an old Dell to a brand new 24″ iMac. One of their biggest tools is their email/mailing list system. Formerly a hybrid of Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook 2001. Since Thunderbird is cross platform exporting and importing their contacts, emails and persona’s wasn’t a big deal. It went very fluid. But then came the time to export from outlook 2001 and import the files into Entourage.

First of all, Entourage doesn’t support outlook archives of any kind that wasn’t on the same platform. Bummer. So i had to find another way. I searched the net but couldn’t find any converter that would fit the deal (for free anyway). The only free option I’ve encountered (and that works perfectly) was Eudora.

Eudora

Eudora is an old rusty email client available for Mac and for PC. So I installed eudora (free edition) on the PC and it immediately allowed me to import all of outlook’s settings, mailboxes, contacts,…. nice!. Next up was exporting those files to the mac. But I couldn’t find any exporting options. After a quick search I discovered that you have to go to the app’s data folder. ( Run: %appdata%\Qualcomm\Eudora ). it has a lot of .mbx files or Mailbox files. I copied all of those without a problem. Then went on to the mac, opened up entourage and chose to import Textfiles. After you follow the wizard you’ll see that you have a choice between .csv of MBOX files. Choose MBOX. Entourage will now start to import everything and there you have it, your old emails on your new computer.

Problems that occurred

3 problems did occur, so don’t let them scare you of doing things wrong.

• The 3 applications crashed a lot, but they still did all the right imports
• Entourage imported double the amount of email that were in the mailboxes, but they were empty. If I had 20 emails, it would show those 20 + 20 empty ones as well. I just deleted those.
• Some emails (maybe a 5%) were unreadable. I have no idea how. Maybe I did something wrong, but they were all just these weird symbols instead of text. Haven’t found a problem for that one.