Sandeep Singh
01-03-2003, 01:36 AM
I'm a linux newbie (2 weeks now) and after trying many different solutions to try to import my MS Outlook emails (over two years worth) into Ximian Evolution, I've finally suceeded and thought that I would share how with all of you out there facing the same challenge.
There are a couple of programs out there such as:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ol2mbox
http://outport.sourceforge.net/
Or I read about using Netscape/Mozilla or Eudora on Windows to import the Outlook pst file into in order to create the industry standard mbox format that Evolution and most other programs use for emails.
The problem with the above solutions is that your attachments don't survive the conversion process. Microsoft stores everything in a .pst file which is proprietary (what else is new).
The rest of the world and most other email programs out there on Windows, Linux and even Mac platforms use or can accept the mbox format.
I found a great program that sucessfully did the conversion in the strangest of places. It's called Outlook2Mac and is a software program that it's Mac developers tout as allowing the easy conversion from Outlook emails to a Mac platform. Their website is http://www.littlemachines.com/
What intrigued me as I was reading their website was that although they made no mention of Linux but they did mention that their program does convert all versions of Outlook mail to standard mbox format. It costs $10.
Getting frustrated and having nothing more to loose, I paid the 10 bucks and downloaded the program and gave it a try (they have different ones that you can download depending of what version of Outlook you are using, it supports them all). It asked me the location of your Outlook pst file and then it presented a tree of all of your Outlook mail folders allowing you to check off which ones you want converted. After this it then created blahblah.mbox files for each folder.
I moved these mbox files over to my Linux partition, fired up Ximian Evolution, did the import thing from the File menu, in the import process it asked me what folder I wanted to import into, letting me create new ones (to match the folders I had in Outlook) and then away it went.
The great thing was that all of my attachments, including word, excel, powerpoints, pdf's, psd's, jpg's all survived the export & import process sucessfully.
Hope this helps.
Sandeep
There are a couple of programs out there such as:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ol2mbox
http://outport.sourceforge.net/
Or I read about using Netscape/Mozilla or Eudora on Windows to import the Outlook pst file into in order to create the industry standard mbox format that Evolution and most other programs use for emails.
The problem with the above solutions is that your attachments don't survive the conversion process. Microsoft stores everything in a .pst file which is proprietary (what else is new).
The rest of the world and most other email programs out there on Windows, Linux and even Mac platforms use or can accept the mbox format.
I found a great program that sucessfully did the conversion in the strangest of places. It's called Outlook2Mac and is a software program that it's Mac developers tout as allowing the easy conversion from Outlook emails to a Mac platform. Their website is http://www.littlemachines.com/
What intrigued me as I was reading their website was that although they made no mention of Linux but they did mention that their program does convert all versions of Outlook mail to standard mbox format. It costs $10.
Getting frustrated and having nothing more to loose, I paid the 10 bucks and downloaded the program and gave it a try (they have different ones that you can download depending of what version of Outlook you are using, it supports them all). It asked me the location of your Outlook pst file and then it presented a tree of all of your Outlook mail folders allowing you to check off which ones you want converted. After this it then created blahblah.mbox files for each folder.
I moved these mbox files over to my Linux partition, fired up Ximian Evolution, did the import thing from the File menu, in the import process it asked me what folder I wanted to import into, letting me create new ones (to match the folders I had in Outlook) and then away it went.
The great thing was that all of my attachments, including word, excel, powerpoints, pdf's, psd's, jpg's all survived the export & import process sucessfully.
Hope this helps.
Sandeep