Painless Migration of Emails from Outlook Express to Apple's Mail.app
I would like to share a tip with you that is particularly handy for switchers, when migrating from Windows to the Mac. If you are using Microsoft Outlook Express on Windows, you will find out soon, that Outlook Express does not provide a convenient way to export all your emails downloaded from your POP email account to a standard format in one batch.
With this recipe, you will be able to easily export your emails from Outlook Express and import them to Apple's Mail.app but also to almost any other email program. The trick is to migrate the emails using an intermediary IMAP email account.
A short primer to POP and IMAP email accounts
Most free email services only support the POP protocol for accessing emails. When accessing your email with POP, your email client downloads every new email from the email server of your provider first. The emails are stored only on your local computer. This is an advantage for your email provider because the provider must not provide storage space for all of your emails on his server but only a rather small storage for buffering your new emails until your email program downloads them. For you as user POP has a number of disadvantages. The most serious disadvantage is that you can store your emails only on one computer because the emails are removed from the server at retrieval.
The IMAP is the much more powerful successor to POP. With an IMAP email account, all emails stay on the server and your email client is only downloading a copy of the emails. This allows you, to access your emails from multiple computers, for example, at home, at the office and with webmail, without every having to worry about synchronization. You can even create mail folders on the IMAP server, which are also synchronized between all email clients. While IMAP is a big advantage for you, IMAP consumes more storage and computing resources at your email provider, since all of your emails are stored on the server. This is the reason, why most free email services don't offer IMAP accounts.
Since POP and IMAP are widely used, almost every email client--even Outlook Express--support both protocols.
Migrating Emails using an intermediary IMAP account
Given this preliminaries about IMAP, you will probably already guess how emails can be exported from Outlook Express. Yes, we will use an intermediary IMAP account for that. Outlook Express allows for moving and copying Emails between accounts, hence we can move all emails from a POP mailbox and local mail folders to an IMAP account and vice versa:
The first thing you need is an email account with IMAP support. For example, the following providers offer free IMAP email accounts: GMX, FastMail or AIM Mail. The services differ mainly in the size of the IMAP storage space that is offered.
After creating for your IMAP account, you need to add this account to Outlook Express. Start Outlook Express and choose Option "Accounts" from the "Tools" menu. Click "Add" "Mail..." to bring up the Internet connection wizard. Here you need to fill in the name of the data for your email server, which you have received from your email provider.
Now you are ready to start the migration. Outlook Express will show both email accounts, your old POP account and your new IMAP account. You can start moving emails from your POP account to your new IMAP account with drag and drop. You can also move local folders to the IMAP account. Be patient, uploading your emails to the IMAP server can take a long time, since the Internet uplink for DSL and Cable modems is generally much slower than the downlink.
After you have moved (or copied) all of your emails to the IMAP server, you need to setup your IMAP account also in Apple Mail.app (or any other Email client). You add a new mail account in the "Account" preference pane of Mail. Mail will then import all emails from your IMAP account. If you chose to use the new IMAP account and the corresponding email address as your standard account, you are done now. If you would like to stick to your previous POP email account, continue with the next step.
Setup your POP account in Mail. You can now move email from your IMAP account to the Inbox of your POP account. A local mail folders can be created with the menu "Mailbox" → "New Mailbox...". Chose location "On My Mac" to make the folder local. You can now move emails from the intermediary IMAP account to your local folders.
I hope you find this hint useful. I know that the hint is obvious once you know it. But I have wasted way too many hours helping some of my friends migrating their Outlook Express email with other methods, before coming up with this idea.
Written July 3rd, 2007