Migrating Email From Outlook (Windows) to Entourage (Mac OS X)
*UPDATE – February 24, 2007* – This post was written almost five years ago; some of the applications described here are no longer available. I also believe there are now better ways of achieving this migration, but I wouldn’t know since I haven’t had to do this again since. If you know of another way of migrating your Outlook mail to OSX, please feel free to post it the comments below.
A couple of days ago I managed to finish migrating my email archives from Outlook on Windows to Entourage on Mac OS X. For those of you facing a similar challenge, here is the play-by-play:
- Import your Outlook mailboxes into Outlook Express.
- Download oe2mbx.exe. This is an open source command line application that converts OE’s proprietary mail format into the UNIX standard MBOX format. (This application had been offline for a while; thanks to Sasha Svitlica for the updated link.)
- Using the Windows command line, visit the directory where your Outlook Express mailboxes reside. (You can find them by searching for files with the *.dbx extension.)
- Run oe2mbx.exe on the .dbx files.
- Change the resulting files’ extension to .mbox
- Copy the .mbox files to your Mac.
- Drag the .mbox files into Entourage’s mail folders pane.
That’s it. Please drop me a line if you have any problems with this procedure or any suggestions to improve it.
Note: this technique should also work with Apple’s Mail.app and other mail programs that can read mbox files.
Another approach
A lot of folks have written to say that they’ve had issues with the approach presented above. It seems the oe2mbx.exe application is not well documented.
Although I haven’t used it, Emailchemy is an application that promises to convert mail to and from a variety of formats. Outlook doesn’t seem to be supported, but Outlook Express is, so you could follow the above approach from step 1, replacing Emailchemy for oe2mbx in step 2.
For anyone still looking to accomplish this conversion:
Follow step 1 as normal.
There is currently a utility called Dbxconv located here: http://freenet-homepage.de/ukrebs/dbxconv.html
Dbxconv can replace the elusive oe2mbx.exe (step 2).
Follow steps 3-7 as normal, using dbxconv instead of oe2mbx. This should do it!
Notes: For big dbx files, be sure to give dbxconv a good long time to process them. It takes awhile without showing much progress. Also, if Entourage doesn’t seem to be taking your .mbox files, be sure you’re placing them in a folder within your Entourage folders pane. It can also take awhile to process large files dropped in.
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