Transfering Email from Outlook (PC) to Entourage (Mac)
When I left my last company I wanted to transfer some of my personal email from my work PC to a format I could use on my Mac – either Mac Mail or Entourage. Thankfully there are ot too many problems getting PCs and Macs to talk to each other these days. Ironically, getting emails out of one Microsoft program (Outlook) ito another Microsoft program (Entourage for the Mac) is one of the few left.
Think of it like trying to have a conversation with some form China who doesn’t speak English. Just for one moment, let’s assume that you don’t speak Chinese (even if you do!). You won’t get too far. What you need is get a translator to converts the conversation backwards and forwards. And this is what you can do with Outlook and Entourage.
In this case the file formats are talking different languages and are therefore not compatible. The solution is to get another piece of email software involved which can work with both formats and use it to translate. The one we are going t use is Mozilla Sea Monkey. Mozilla created Firefox which you may have heard of. Sea-Monkey is their all-in-one application. It is not only a browser (the software for surfing the web) but it also has an email function and that’s what we are going to use. We can dump it all later once it has translated everything for us.
With the right procedure, it is very easy to get your mail from Outlook to Entourage (i.e. from the PC to a Mac), and keep all the attachments intact. The directions below apply to Windows 2000 on the PC and OSX 10.3 (Panther) and above on the Mac.
1. On the PC, install Mozilla Sea-Monkey and make sure the email option is installed as well (i.e. not browser only).
2. In its Mail application, select Tools, Import, and then select the Mail radio button. Select Outlook from the next dialog box and your Outlook email will be imported (email will remain within the correct folders).
3. In Windows 2000, your mail folders will be created as files located in Documents and Settings/username/Application Data/Mozilla/Profiles folder somewhere (there may be a few more levels under this). The files we want have no extension. Add a .mbox extension to these.
4. Copy the .mbox files to the desktop of your Mac (using a network is easier, although burning them on to a CD will work too). For easier management, add them to a desktop folder called ‘Imported mail’ or something similar. Files with a .mbox extension will be shown with a mailbox icon.
5. On the Mac, drag each .mbox icon (i.e. each folder you used in Outlook) from the desktop to Entourage or its icon in the Dock, and click Import on the dialog box that appears.
6. Repeat step 5 for each .mbox file you want to import into Entourage.
This procedure will successfully move your email from Outlook to Entourage on the Mac. To move calendars, tasks and contacts you can use a PDA —I have no experience with doing this, but I’m sure a method would exist somewhere.
Good luck!