weird kid software

Enough people have trouble with importing email into Outlook or trying to create PST files that we felt it necessary to give an explicit walk-through of detailed instructions. We’ve also been experimenting with answering tech support requests with video “screencasts”, so I’m putting them both in this post for future reference.

Outlook has many advanced features and the user interface presents many different ways to perform any given task, but the problem is that not all results are consistent. After much experimentation, we’ve found a sequence of actions that will work in most circumstances.

The screencast starts with the act of converting Entourage email, but you could substitute the converting of any supported format. For example, you could use these instructions to move a standard mbox file into Outlook, too, as a general way to convert mbox to PST files.
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Version 9.8.2 is a maintenance update that includes an improved Entourage converter and a few bug fixes. It’s a free update to all who have access to any 9.x release of Emailchemy. If you are converting Entourage or Outlook PST files, then you should install this update.

The new Entourage converter has increased throughput (i.e. “it’s faster”) because it now keeps the entire database index in memory. This reduces the amount of jumping around the file, and it doesn’t increase the memory requirements significantly because all Entourage database files have known maximum number of items they can hold.

Also, and perhaps more importantly, the new Entourage converter extracts more data. It preserves all message flags (e.g. read/unread, priority, replied-to, forwarded, flagged) and sent attachments now too. Previous versions only preserved received attachments.

The Outlook PST converter was also modified to be a bit more resilient to corrupted PST files. Still, it’s always a good idea to make sure your PST file still works in Outlook before trying to run it through Emailchemy. See our previous post on working with corrupt PST files for more details.

Outlook PST files have a very complicated internal database structure, which is read from and written to probably thousands of times every day, and they tend to be quite large. The combination of these characteristics, combined with the fact that Outlook and Windows do crash every now an then, makes the Outlook PST file somewhat susceptible to data corruption.

It can be random, and you may not even notice it right away, but even if a single bit gets flipped from a “0″ to a “1″ in a PST file, you could lose messages or the ability to even open the PST file in Outlook.

How do you know if a PST file is corrupt? There are major tells, like if Outlook tells you, for example, when you try to open it, or, if Outlook crashes when you try to open a particular message or open a particular folder in the PST data. But sometimes it is more subtle, like you may discover messages or attachments have disappeared, search no longer returns any results, or you can’t move messages in or out of the PST file. These are the cases that you may not notice in normal day-to-day use, but when you want to export your email from Outlook PST files with a utility like Emailchemy, you just might.
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Version 9.8.1 is a maintenance update with a few bug fixes and one new feature. It’s a free update to all who have access to any 9.x release of Emailchemy. If you are converting Outlook, Claris Emailer 1.x, or Entourage cache files, then you should install this update.

The new feature is for setting a default sender for Claris Emailer 1.x sent messages that don’t have a sender recorded. Claris Emailer assumed that the email was sent from you, the user of Claris Emailer, so it didn’t (or doesn’t, if there’s anyone still using it) bother to record that bit of information. Having a default sender is a convenience, if anything, so that when you view these messages in another email app, you no longer have to guess who sent them.
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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:
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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