New to mac with a couple of questions

Good afternoon,

My wife has been jones'n for a mac book for a while. I'm a PC guy (IT desktop support/call center manager for a 1500 user network. I don't know anything about macs. I have a couple of questions.

I have maintained an aol account so my mom and my sister can have dial up access to the internet and email. It's easy and it makes them happy. My wife also uses aol for her email. She has stored many email messages in local folders on her Dell laptop. I want to move them to the mac mail program (or move them to her mac so she can use aol for mac and access all of her past saved emails. Any suggestions? Does Apple offer a migration service to migrate data from her PC to her new macbook pro?

Thanks in advance.

John

Welcome to MF!

Here is Apple's very own guide to moving Windows files to your (her) Mac. It shouldn't be too difficult to figure out, but if any questions arise then you know where to ask them (hint: here)!

As for moving old emails, I am curious about the format that the mail is saved in... Could you provide that information please? It may not be necessary, and someone may have a quicker answer, but I'm not sure how to approach the question otherwise.

Edit: This may potentially be of help: Emailchemy It should convert whatever email format those AOL emails are saved in into something more universal. It is a trial, however. If you download it you can view the Readme included to learn of it's features and any limitations that the trial has.

The email files are stored in personal file cabinets. I can save the "folder" as a Mail.pfc file. After I save that file, I can (on my PC) I can open/import the file back into aol.

On the mac version of aol, I don't get that option.

Thanks,

John

Just from some person experience of swapping to new machines and such both for myself and my parents (in their 60s/70's), it is a good time to make habit changes as well.

For instance, AOL is not a portable email server. Once you pull the email down, it is up to the new client to attempt to import the old emails. Make the change over to something fully on the web like Gmail. You can even set up a forward in AOL to have all their incoming mail forwarded automatically to the new account. Also, on the new account you can set the "From" to be any email account, including the AOL account. This way, to everyone else, it still looks like the emails are coming from the AOL account and no one has to change email addresses.

Again, when moving to a new computer from an old, it is a great time to make other changes. Especially when moving from different operating systems. But in the future, when it comes time to move to yet another computer, that all important email will already be on the web with no need to import.

Also, just an FYI, stay away from using POP3 email at all costs and find one that supports IMAP (like Gmail.) That way, nothing gets permanently downloaded to the computer.

It has made light-years' of difference with dealing with my parents' switches, making my life so much easier to swap them out.