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Bob ConklinFlag for United States of America

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Exporting Mail

I need to know if there is a clean and neat way to export mail from the Macintosh 10.3.5 e-mail client  to a form that can be imported into Outlook 2003 for windows. I have been tasked with migrating our Macintosh machines to windows machines and need a way to move peoples mail from one to the other with out forwarding all that mail back to each user. Any ideas?
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brettmjohnson
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Mail.app uses traditional Unix style mbox format to store its mail.

Go to /Users/username/Library/Mail/Mailboxes
You will see several directories with a .mbox extenstion.  For instance:

drwx------   9 bjohnson  bjohnson       306 14 May 16:07 Apple.mbox
drwx------  10 bjohnson  bjohnson       340  6 May 14:34 Bioinformatics.mbox
drwx------   7 bjohnson  bjohnson       238 18 Aug 08:19 Deleted Messages.mbox
drwx------   9 bjohnson  bjohnson       306 11 Aug 21:56 Drafts.mbox
drwx------   7 bjohnson  bjohnson       238 19 Aug 15:04 INBOX.mbox
drwx------   6 bjohnson  bjohnson       204 16 Aug 13:42 Junk.mbox
drwx------   5 bjohnson  bjohnson       170 19 Aug 14:58 Outbox.mbox
drwx------   9 bjohnson  bjohnson       306  6 May 14:34 Party.mbox
drwx------   9 bjohnson  bjohnson       306 14 Aug 15:49 Sent Messages.mbox

These correspond to the Mail folders, so you will probably want to import
them individually into Outlook.  However the directories themselves are
not the actual mbox format.  Inside each one you will find several files:

-rw-r--r--  1 bjohnson  bjohnson      399 18 Dec  2003 Info.plist
-rw-r--r--  1 bjohnson  bjohnson   806912 18 Dec  2003 content_index
-rw-r--r--  1 bjohnson  bjohnson  7809313 29 Oct  2003 mbox
-rw-r--r--  1 bjohnson  bjohnson    84993 25 Jun 00:17 table_of_contents

The one named 'mbox' is the file you want to input into Outlook.  The
others are recreatable meta-data about the mbox file.


However that seems like quite a bit of work to do for a bunch of people that
are going to quit their jobs after you have forced them to give up Mac OS X
to use Windows instead.
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Scorp888

Importing individual mails into Outlook is going to be a painful way of importing thousands of mail messages for a group of people.

Far easier, is to convert to Eudora on the Mac, then convert to Eudora on the PC, then Import from there.

I'd say the installs would be about 15 mins per mac/pc.  So if you've just got 10-100 mails, then import them individually, more and then go via Eudora.
Avatar of Bob Conklin

ASKER

Hi Scorp888
Either I am missing something or I have to buy the program, but I downloaded the free version of Eudora and installed it on a test Mac and PC and I fail to find a neat way to move the mail from the MAC version to the PC version and have the PC open the mail in anything that resembles a useable form. Like I said I most likely am missing somehting but this looks as painful as anything I have tried so far.  
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Scorp888

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