Too complicated...

I just thought I'd give you a grin at how silly my attempts to convert to Mac have become.

Just a small view of my mail saga...

In the Windows world, I've got years of archived mail and addresses in Outlook.

When I switched to Mac, I tried to import them into Mail - but there is no transfer route available for that.

So then a friend suggested I use Thunderbird. Brilliant idea! so I go back to the PC and move my Outlook mail to Thunderbird. Then I move the Thunderbird data store from the PC to the Mac.

I use Thunderbird for a while, but I really don't like some of the ways it does things, so I decide to go out and buy Office for Mac, thinking Entourage will be like Outlook for the Mac.

Not quite.

Despite them saying there was a way to import mbox (Thunderbird) files into Entourage, there was no way I could do it. I'd browse to the directory with the datastore and despite being able to see the files the import button was always greyed out.

Hey - but wait - Mail will import mbox files! And Entourage will import Mail files! (Supposedly.)

So, for those keeping track, my mail trail looked like this:

Outlook (PC) to
Thunderbird (PC) to
Thunderbird (Mac) to
Mail (Mac) to
Entourage (Mac)

Now, Entourage has some changed part-import of my mail, where all the addresses have been lost, and most of the messages have become multi-megabyte amalgams composed of several different ones...

This process has taken about a month, so along the way each individual program has dribs and drabs of new mail, so going back to the Original Outlook store and then trying a direct import into Entourage will miss several important business messages.

<sigh>

Fun.

Just venting... Pay no mind. You may go back to your regularly scheduled web browsing now...

- BCB.

Did you try just dragging the mbox files into Entourage

What didn't you like about Thunderbird? I love it, especially the beta!

Unfortunately, there was an easier way you could have done the transfer very easily if you were willing to invest a few dollars...

I went through the thought of doing the various transfers, but I decided I wanted simplicity, so I went and bought Oulook2Mac (costs $10, can be found here - Little Machines &#151; Error 404 &#151; Page Not Found. I had between 40,000 and 50,000 messages in several subfolders to transfer, including my address book and my calendar. It worked for me wonderfully.

It's designed to work with Outlook on the export side, and it did take some time to export all of the messages, but it appears all of my mail and contacts and such transfered.

btw - I have no affiliation with them, I am just a happy switcher that used their software

I find Eudora to be quite helpful as a middle man when migrating from classic Outlook to something as new as Thunderbird or Mail.

kahlil88 said:

What didn't you like about Thunderbird? I love it, especially the beta!

Click to expand...

The appearance isn't the greatest - I like how Outlook / Entourage is laid out better. (And I gave it a month to see if I'd get used to it.) Also, the rules seem to be quite limited in scope...