Emailchemy 11 introduces support for Outlook Mac 2011 OLM files. It also adds features to the Google Apps Uploader command line tool for more control over scripted migrations.

Use the coupon code V11PROMO before June 19 to save $18.95 off the regular price. That means you can get the Personal Edition – Individual license for just $11!

I’ve seen this happen when the RGE files were created on the Windows PC and then moved to the Mac. There are certain methods of moving files between Mac and PC that can screw up the encoding of the linefeed character.

Try this method instead:

1) copy your PST files to your Mac
2) run Emailchemy and convert Outlook PST to Entourage Archive (.rge files)
3) run Entourage and use its import wizard and import the .rge file you created in step 2

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.

View Screencast here: http://screencast.com/t/ktDmvphFJ6∞

Step 1: Convert your mail to the IMAP ImportServer format

1. do this on the computer you are moving to, or at least the same kind of computer (Windows, Mac, etc.)
2. copy your email from your old computer to the new computer
3. run Emailchemy, use the “Conversion Wizard” tool (you’ll be in it after Emailchemy starts)
4. select the source format, click Next
5. select your old email files, click Convert
6. select the IMAP ImportServer format from the drop-down list
7. enter a name, like “convertedmail”

Step 2: Start the IMAP ImportServer

1. in Emailchemy, click the Toolbox button
2. select the “convertedmail.imapserver” folder — it should already be in the file box, though
3. click the “Start Server” button

Step 3: Connect Outlook to the IMAP server

1. launch Outlook, using the menu, select Tools –> Account Settings…
2. click New to create a new account
3. choose Microsoft Exchange, POP3, IMAP or HTTP, then click Next
4. at the bottom of the next window, check “Manually configure server settings…” and click Next
5. select Internet E-mail and click Next
6. Enter the following:
   • Your Name: import
   • E-mail Address: import@localhost
   • Account Type: IMAP
   • Incoming mail server: localhost
   • Outgoing mail server: localhost
   • User Name: import
   • Password: mymail
7. Click “More Settings…”, click the Advanced tab, and enter:
   • Incoming server (IMAP): 8143
8. Click OK, then Next, then Finish, then Close (to close the Account Settings window)

[Note: at this point you should be able to browse your mail on the server. If you do not see your mail folders inside the mail account folder in Outlooks navigation pane, then you can right-click on the account name (import@localhost) and select "Update Folder List"]

Step 4: Force Outlook to download the mail

1. in Outlook, click on a folder in the new account folder, any folder
2. using the main menu, select Tools –> Send/Receive –> Send/Receive Settings –> Define Send/Receive Groups
3. select All Accounts, then click the Edit button
4. select the option: “Download complete items including attachments…”
   • optional: uncheck “Send mail items” (turn this back on after done importing)
5. click OK, then Close
6. click Send/Receive in the toolbar

[Note: this part can take some time while Outlook is downloading all the email from the server.]

When complete, your mail will be in the PST file found by right-clicking on the account folder, select Properties, then click “Advanced…”. From this point you can copy your mail to an existing PST file or a new one.

Step 5 Option A: Copy the mail to an existing local PST file

1. right-click on the server folder you want to copy — all subfolders will be copied automatically
2. select “Copy (name of folder you selected)…”
3. a window will popup and ask you to select the folder to copy the server folder to, or you can create a new folder
4. click OK

Step 5 Option B: Copy the mail to a new PST file:

1. select the server folder you want to copy
2. using the main menu, select File –> Import and Export…
3. select “Export to a file”, click Next
4. select “Personal Folder File (.pst)”, click Next
5. double check you have the right folder selected, then click “Include subfolders”
6. select where to save the new PST file and what to call it, then click Finish

At this point you can then open the PST file you just created with File –> Open –> Outlook Data File

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.

Inbox Repair Tool on Windows Vista

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.

Emailchemy reads the PST file directly from the disk — not using the Microsoft connectors or API’s, but it reads the data from the PST’s database in much the same way that Outlook would. When Emailchemy finds corrupted entries in the PST data, it will first tell you about it by logging a warning to the console (or to stdout.log or stderr.log file) and then it will try to recover. Most of the time, if an expected data object like an attachment or other message body part is missing, Emailchemy will easily recover and you will get the message in the output with all the data that Emailchemy was able to find. However, because data corruption is random in nature it can sometimes cause Emailchemy to halt or stop the conversion prematurely — but this only happens with files that even Outlook would have trouble opening. With Emailchemy, you would at least get some of the messages out.

However, not getting all your messages out is simply unacceptable. So, what can you do if you have a corrupt PST file? (Remember, if Emailchemy is not completely converting your PST file, then it is likely corrupt.)

Fortunately, Microsoft is aware of how easily the PST file can become corrupted, so they provide the necessary tools for repairing them. The Inbox Repair Tool from Microsoft, aka “scanpst.exe”, can identify PST file corruption and most of the time repair it to the point that Outlook can again open the file — and thus so that Emailchemy can read the PST file too.

Here’s an excerpt from the Microsoft support article on how to use scanpst.exe:

ScanPST mostly validates and corrects errors in the internal data structures of a .pst file. The .pst file is a database file. Therefore, structures, such as BTrees and reference counts, are checked and repaired as necessary. These low-level objects have no knowledge of the upper-level structures, such as messages, calendar items, and so on, that are built upon them. If ScanPST determines a specific block of the structure or table is unreadable or corrupted, ScanPST removes it. If that block was part of a specific item in Outlook, the item will be removed when it is validated. User may not expect this behavior. However, the removal of the item is appropriate given the circumstances. Also, this specific type of situation is probably very rare, and it will always be entered in the ScanPST log file.

Scanpst.exe will also create a backup of the original PST file before attempting repair. Keep this backup in case you experience the rare case of messages or attachments (items) being removed from the database as a result of the repair.

To sum up, in most cases you will not need to run scanpst.exe on your PST file before converting it with Emailchemy, but if you think Emailchemy isn’t converting your PST file correctly, try running scanpst.exe on it first. If you see warnings written to the console logs during the conversion of your PST file, definitely try running scanpst.exe on the PST file and then try the conversion again.

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.

Bugs fixed:

• Outlook PST HTML message bodies that define alternate charsets now being transcoded correctly
• Outlook PST attachment file names now being converted to UTF-8 for better handling of international characters
• AOL for Windows wizard no longer case sensitive when searching for PFC files
• Entourage cache files from all versions of Entourage now supported. There were some files from the very earliest Entourage version that were not being picked up.

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