Outlook .pst file to Apple Mail

A friend of my wife's from work just bought himself a Mac. He wants to move his outlook mail over to Apple mail. I found Outlook2Mac, but I want to see if there is a better or easier way to this.

no idea, but something i may be interested in as well, get my personal email over to OSX.

Are there any other mail client options for OSX as well?

Try this link?

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061104002244385

I have (successfully) used O2M to migrate from Outlook 2003 (Windows) to both Entourage and finally Mail.app.

I searched for a long time to try and find cheaper (free) methods, but this seemed to work out the best for me. The main advantage was that O2M allowed me to transfer mail, as well as contacts and calendar information. Note: I am not 100% convinced that the contacts conversion is completely perfect - I suspect I am missing a couple of phone numbers from a couple of contacts. But then I did transfer over 4000 records, so it was not too bad.

Mail-wise, O2M pulled it off perfectly.

If I was *just* transferring mail then I would probably load Thunderbird onto the windows pc, import the mail to it and them copy the .mbx files over manually. I have tried this for moving mail from Linux to Mail.app, and it seems to work pretty well. Not fast, mind you.

Good luck,

Steven

Outlook2Mail is great. Well worth the few dollars it costs.

One more vote for Outlook2Mac here.

It costs ten bucks and does exactly what it's supposed to do-- get you from Outlook to Mac Mail. I'm not sure how much "better or easier" it could be.

I took several years of Outlook (and Outlook Express mail, by adding an extra step) and migrated it to the Mac in about 10 minutes, attachments and all. Here's the thread where I talked about my experiences with Outlook2Mac.

Just a question, i love outlooks right click / create rule feature.

does mail. have this rule feature, or is it cumbersome like thunderbird where you have to go into a menu and tell it what item to look for and such?

Nooooo.... don't spend any money, there's no need.

On the Windows machine, download Thunderbird, from Mozilla.

In Thunderbird, import from Outlook (it's v easy, just follow the instructions).

Then... find your Thunderbird files (the site has a great FAQ, I am at work so can't walk you through this, but it's the usual documents and settings, yourname, local settings, application data etc... and you're looking for two files, which will be called Mail and Sent (I think). Just rename them to Mail.mbx and Sent.mbx, copy them over to your Mac and, woohoo, you can import them to virtually any Mail App.

That's how I did it anyway... into Entourage and Mail.

what if you don't have the PC anymore?

I've got a gigantic .pst file and my Mac. I can use either Entourage or Mail, and I just want to get the stuff off my pst and be done with it. I do not have access to the PC anymore, though... is there anything I can do, or do I just need to find a PC? Thanks!

Zoolook's is the best free way of transferring Outlook's mail from PC to Mac

Zoolook said:

Nooooo.... don't spend any money, there's no need.

On the Windows machine, download Thunderbird, from Mozilla.

In Thunderbird, import from Outlook (it's v easy, just follow the instructions).

Then... find your Thunderbird files (the site has a great FAQ, I am at work so can't walk you through this, but it's the usual documents and settings, yourname, local settings, application data etc... and you're looking for two files, which will be called Mail and Sent (I think). Just rename them to Mail.mbx and Sent.mbx, copy them over to your Mac and, woohoo, you can import them to virtually any Mail App.

That's how I did it anyway... into Entourage and Mail.

Click to expand...

I have been attempting to go this route, but it seems like Thunderbird is only importing Outlook mail thats currently in my Outlook at present, which happens to be a work account through an exchange server. I would like to import a different PST file that I have saved from my personal account over the years, which is not in Outlook anymore, but saved on a file on a CD. I'm guessing im out of luck but would love it if someone could correct me if I'm wrong. When i choose "import" in Thunderbird, it doesnt ask me for a PST location, but rather appears to be importing my exchange mail and therefore crashes.

import .pst into Mail

Udjamini said:

I have been attempting to go this route, but it seems like Thunderbird is only importing Outlook mail thats currently in my Outlook at present, which happens to be a work account through an exchange server. I would like to import a different PST file that I have saved from my personal account over the years, which is not in Outlook anymore, but saved on a file on a CD. I'm guessing im out of luck but would love it if someone could correct me if I'm wrong. When i choose "import" in Thunderbird, it doesnt ask me for a PST location, but rather appears to be importing my exchange mail and therefore crashes.

Click to expand...

I am in the same situation and am trying to find a solution. Did you ever manage to find an easy route?

I would love to avoid having to break out the old pc and then import the .pst files from the cd and so forth.


best regards
Mikkel

Jeebus H. Cripes, spend the frickin' $10 on O2M already! Sheesh!

It WORKS, and it will be DONE. People who will waste hours and effort trying to find a free solution (like the silly and convoluted "just port it all through two email programs!" nonsense) remind of people who will drive to a mall all the way across town (in their Hummer!) for an hour to save $1 on a purchase.

I have to agree with chas_m. O2M is only 10 bucks and it works so nice and easy. As we say here in Texas - no fuss, no muss, no cuss.

chscag said:

I have to agree with chas_m. O2M is only 10 bucks and it works so nice and easy. As we say here in Texas - no fuss, no muss, no cuss.

Click to expand...

Hmmm... Most of the solution assume that the Outlook data is coming from a Windows machine (pst file). I want to transfer data from Outlook on a Mac into Apple Mail on a Mac. The only supported export format in Outlook Mac is .ost and that's not a supported import format in Apple Mail.

Thoughts?

Actually, a little hunting turned up a quick and easy way - if you have the developer tools installed on your mac. The library libpst (http://www.five-ten-sg.com/libpst/packages/) includes a function called "readpst" that will convert an outlook pst file to an mbox format that Apple mail will happily import. You'll also need to get the Boost libraries (http://www.boost.org/), but both build and install flawlessly on the mac.

OK, so it's a command line set of tools, but really easy to use.

SeanF said:

Hmmm... Most of the solution assume that the Outlook data is coming from a Windows machine (pst file). I want to transfer data from Outlook on a Mac into Apple Mail on a Mac. The only supported export format in Outlook Mac is .ost and that's not a supported import format in Apple Mail.

Thoughts?

Click to expand...

If the data is currently on an Exchange server it seems you can do this by connecting Mail directly to the Exchange Server - I just configured Mail to connect to the OWA URL of a customer.

All that is left would be to suck all the mail/contacts etc over to your mac.

how to import pst files without a PC

The situation: I had a pst file with old emails (about 1.4 GB). I just had access to a Mac.
Note that most softwares available out there, including the commercial softwares mentioned in this thread, require that you still have access to Outlook on a PC to convert pst files. Totally useless for me.

The solution: this is what worked for me:
See instructions here.
- Installed readpst, a unix command line program.
- Ran readpst. It converted my pst file into mbox files, one file for each folder I initially had in Outlook.
- Started Mail and went to File/Import Mailboxes/Files in mbox format

The first time I tried to import all the mailboxes at once. But for some reason the body of the emails was not imported. So I started to import the mailboxes one by one. It worked. I then tried to select several mailboxes and it worked too. I'm not sure what happened the first time. Maybe a size issue.
Anyway, it worked, and now I can access my old emails, including the attachements.

about downloading readpst

Good point in the post above regarding the need for developer tools.
Here are the complete instructions to install readpst AND the developer tools.
A workaround is to install Xena. It is a software to create archives that you might not need, but the point here is that it includes a pre-compiled version of readpst, executable on Mac. It is still command line, but no compilation is required. readpst is located in the Xena/macx86 sub-directory.

Caveat Emptor with Outlook2Mac & Foreign Languages

Outlook 2 Mac does not save as Unicode, so if you have foreign language emails as I do you may lose their content. You can re-save as unicode, but this is fundamentally unsettling to me. I may try the Thunderbird method for my mail. (I have Chinese language emails).
See Little Machines — O2M FAQ

"Does O2M support languages other than English?
O2M does not officially support non-English languages, but some of our customers have reported success with O2M and German and Russian languages by saving the converted files to Unicode. You may want to use the trial version of O2M to see if the program will work with your non-English-language files. After you're finished converting the files with O2M, save them as "Unicode" in Notepad".