Outlook2Mac problem, does not support Chinese

I'm trying to move my emails, contacts, and calender from my Outlook .pst files into mail.app, and Outlook2Mac seemed like a great solution. But unfortunately, it turned all of my emails and contacts in Chinese into gobble-dee-gook I'm guessing it doesn't support unicode or something. Can anyone suggest an alternative process? I'd be willing to go through an alternative program like thunderbird, or outlook express, but it appears that none of these can import .pst files either. Microsoft is like an evil ex who won't let go!

riverteeth said:

I'm trying to move my emails, contacts, and calender from my Outlook .pst files into mail.app, and Outlook2Mac seemed like a great solution. But unfortunately, it turned all of my emails and contacts in Chinese into gobble-dee-gook I'm guessing it doesn't support unicode or something. Can anyone suggest an alternative process? I'd be willing to go through an alternative program like thunderbird, or outlook express, but it appears that none of these can import .pst files either. Microsoft is like an evil ex who won't let go!

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This is a tough one without spending money on various programs which may or may not do the job.

Something you might try:

Assuming you have already setup an account for yourself in Mac Mail, you might try forwarding the messages from mail in Outlook to yourself using another email address. Then, download the messages into your account in Mac Mail. I did this using GMail and it worked for me. However, if you have a very large number of messages, it can be tedious and time consuming. My emails were not in an Asian language so I don't really know if they will come through in the original Chinese. I suggest trying it with one or two emails first.

Regards.

chscag said:

This is a tough one without spending money on various programs which may or may not do the job.

Something you might try:

Assuming you have already setup an account for yourself in Mac Mail, you might try forwarding the messages from mail in Outlook to yourself using another email address. Then, download the messages into your account in Mac Mail. I did this using GMail and it worked for me. However, if you have a very large number of messages, it can be tedious and time consuming. My emails were not in an Asian language so I don't really know if they will come through in the original Chinese. I suggest trying it with one or two emails first.

Regards.

Click to expand...

Thanks, but we're talking about four years worth of email here, about half of which is in Chinese or Japanese, thousands and thousands of emails. I'd gladly pay for a third party app if I knew it would work.

Yes, I've set up an account in mail.app, and I can see that one can import from Thunderbird, Entourage, and other programs I'm not familiar with. I have Entourage because my school has bought a mass license for all students. So I tried that, but ran into the same problem of how to import .pst files. I downloaded Thunderbird and set up an account, but also could not figure out how to import .pst's. Seems I've heard some talk about using MS Exchange server to do this; I don't know anything about Exchange, so I might try learning about that next.

Has anyone ever tried a app called Mail Navigator for this purpose? Looks like it should work, but you have to buy it in order to do the actual exporting of messages, and it's 29 bucks. But it can read .pst files and apparently export eudora mail folders (which as I understand it is the mbox format).

So I figured out that Mail Navigator has the same problem of messing up the text encoding of my Chinese messages, but I figured out that by highlighting the test each email, then changing the text encoding from automatic to Big 5 (traditional Chinese), everything works as normal.