We get a lot of questions from people asking how to move their mail into Outlook. I understand this can be a bit confusing, since Emailchemy does not write PST files, and Outlook can’t really import anything (though strangely, it does import from Netscape 4 and Eudora 3.2?).

Emailchemy can help you move your mail into Outlook, but you have to use the IMAP ImportServer tool (in Emailchemy) to do it. Here’s how:

1) Using Emailchemy’s conversion wizard, convert your old email files to the IMAP ImportServer format.

2) Launch Emailchemy’s IMAP ImportServer tool, select the folder you saved the mail to in step 1, and click “Start Server”.

3) In Outlook, create a new IMAP email account with the server, username, and password that the IMAP ImportServer tells you to use. Here is a link to a web site that has a walkthrough for creating an IMAP email account in Outlook.

4) In Outlook, (either automatically or after clicking “Send/Receive”), you will see a folder on the localhost IMAP server (the IMAP ImportServer). This folder will have all your converted mail in it. Drag this folder to a local folder in your Outlook browser, or use Outlook’s “Export to File” feature to write the contents of the hosted folder directly to a PST file.

As for “where” you do each step, you have to be running the IMAP server on the same machine as Outlook (security restriction), and it’s usually best to do the actual conversion of email on the target platform. So, if you are moving from a Mac, I would copy your entire mail folder from your Mac over to the Windows PC and run Emailchemy there for the conversion and the import.

From: Michael Aumeerally
To: contact@weirdkid.com
Subject: emailchemy
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2008 11:39:33 +0000

Hi there!

I just bought emailchemy from you a week ago, and it is a godsend!

I had over 5,000 messages on my Windows PC that I wanted to take over to Mac OS X Mail. The Outlook PST file was about 1GB.

I had previously tried Outlook2Mac on the PC itself, and it looked like it was going to take days to convert it all.

emailchemy converted the lot in about 20 mins on my new iMac.

Your program is pretty much the only solution for just taking a .pst from a PC and importing it into any e-mail application on the Mac – and believe me there is a good demand for that.

Just a note about one quirk I had in the process, I don’t think it’s a bug with your program – but a bug with the way Mac OS X Mail imports messages – I’ve seen it when bringing in mbox files created by other programs; basically if there is a hierarchy of folders being imported by Mac OS X Mail, messages in the top level folders import fine, but messages imported in the subfolders appear as blank messages with just the headers and no content. Now I managed to get round this by saving the messages converted by emailchemy as Mac OS X Mail 1.0 format – as they always seem to import into Mail fine – but this problem does affect messages converted into Mac OS X Mail 2.0 and later format which are then imported into Mail. Just to let you know I’m running Mac OS X Mail 3.2 on Leopard.

Just one last thing, it would be really great if your program could extract Microsoft Outlook contacts from the .PST file and export them as .vcf files. I know it’s a lot to ask, but I definitely would be interested in paying for that; at the moment I have to rely on Outlook2Mac to bring the contacts across.

Thanks very much for making this program,

Regards

Mike

[note: We've noted and mentioned weird behavior in Mac OS X Mail's import wizard before. Mike here found a method that seems to work pretty well, though. -- Matt]

From: akag70@xxxxx.xxx
To: contact@weirdkid.com
Subject: Great Software
Date: Sat, 1 Mar 2008 15:06:41 +0100

I was fighting with my work email (outlook) and my personal computer (mac) since one year.

I tried all the different solutions that forums provide (use thunderbird, export, import) and I waste a lot of time; I tried O2M but it was painful: it took a lot of time and half the time was wasted, because anytime something happened: a problem with windows, lost attachments, and so on.

Finally I reach your website and after an enthusiastic demo experience (just 10 minute to convert a 2.5 gb .pst file) I bought the full version and in 15 minutes I solved all the issues.

I just believe your software is really great and solve terrificly any issues of mail conversion.

(I was looking through a lot of websites and forum before I get into a message talking of you: why you are not so known?)

thank you!
Andrea Gino