Importing email. Piece o’ cake, right? Gulp. Windows Mail is one of the reasons I’m trying to escape Windows. It is slow and stoopid. Importing from Outlook Express resulted in me losing a lot of folders and a month of Sent messages. It sucks. Big time.
Unfortunately, W Mail is encoded in some secret way so you can’t just export to any other system. I searched the world over and thought I’d found true love at this page: http://www.vistax64.com/vista-mail/153699-exporting-windows-mail-messages-outlook-explorer-not-working.html
According to a very engineery sounding chap I just needed to copy all my .eml files into Outlook Express on someone else’s computer and then export them in a format that Thunderbird could use and then export them into a system Evolution can use. Ain’t technology grand?
So here I sit preparing to burn 7, 989 email messages to a CD so I can import the messages on my wife’s computer. This has taken 45 minutes so far.
Tune in for more horror stories in my continuing epic struggle to escape from Vista.
I’ve found Ubuntu to be worth it once the export/import thing is done with the mail.
Even though it’s proprietary, I use the flash player from Adobe as it appears to be more consistent, at least for me. But you may have to uninstall all flash related components and reinstall to get it working.
Once all that was done, I do all my work including sound editing and page layout on my Ubuntu box, and Vista is unknown in this household and office!
Good luck with it all.
Thanks for good wishes. The flash thing has me stumped but I’ll try again tomorrow.
BTW, this didn’t work so I’m still pondering how to get all my messages over to Evolution. Do I really need all those messages stretching back to 2000?
It’s hard to escape the clutches of the Gates, but well done for trying, and congratulations for not succumbing to the poisoned Apple.
I would export those messages to Thunderbird and stop there. Thunderbird rocks! Who needs Windows Mail or Outlook Express?
Getting it into Outlook Express is an intermediate step in rescuing your email from Bill’s clutches.
This evening I happened to meet someone who had Vista and Ubuntu installed as dual boot on one computer, and was having problems. My advice to her was give up and install just XP.
This is sad. How much is your time worth? That said, you would have the same problem getting your emails out of Vista to go into a Mac. I emailed you what I found in a forum on this. Hope it either helps or sends you crying all the way to the Apple Store.
Today I bought a 500 Gig external harddrive and I’m dumping all my old junk on it and all my photos and music. My Dell’s harddrive is starting to have some breathing space again. Part of the problem is that I shouldn’t have just copied all my stuff from my old computer to my new computer.
Thanks for the email. I’ll check it out since none of the other methods have worked.
There used to be a neat little free program called “Dawn” that read almost all email file formats and exported them into readable formats – well worth looking for.
(I haven’t needed dawn since I moved to Thunderbird, which is great, except unlike Pegasus it does not remind me when I forget to attach and attachment
Pegausus just put a warning “Did you mean to add an attachment?” up if the leters “attach” appeared in the email and there was no attachment – brilliant!)