Moving Apple Mail emails to Microsoft Outlook

June 17, 2010 11:02 AM

How do I move my emails FROM Apple's Mail program TO Microsoft Outlook on a PC?

There are so many instructions online for doing the opposite.

At my office, I was working on a MacBook running OSX. Now I am switching to A Dell Vostro running Windows 7 (not by choice).

I need to get all my emails from Mail (from 2 accounts) to Outlook.

Please help!

posted by punkbitch to technology (7 answers total)

Is your office using Exchange? Do they offer IMAP connectivity?

If so, add a second e-mail account to your Apple Mail using the IMAP connection, then drag e-mails into it from your other account.
posted by odinsdream at 11:19 AM on June 17, 2010

No. And to re-clarify: I'm trying to move FROM Apple Mail to Outlook. Any other ideas?
posted by punkbitch at 11:30 AM on June 17, 2010

What version of Mail.app?
posted by smallerdemon at 11:46 AM on June 17, 2010

Also, what is your goal as the end result? To have all the emails stored in the Mail.app stored in an Outlook .pst file?
posted by smallerdemon at 11:48 AM on June 17, 2010

I think odinsdream is on to the only probable (free) solution. I don't think Exchange is necessary, though. My guess is that you could also use any IMAP email account for the intermediary holding storage location. Since Gmail is free and offers decent storage and has IMAP available it seems like the most likely solution.

Cursorily thinking it over I would say to create a gmail account or use your existing one and make sure to enable IMAP connectivity in the account setup. Then, setup Mail.app to connect to it (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77663 - Newer versions of Mail.app will have Gmail built in and doesn't require these instructions). Once setup in Mail.app, ctrl-click (right click) on the Gmail folder and add a "Storage" or "Transfer From Mac" folder or whatever you want to call it. Then find the email messages you have storage in Mail.app locally and drag them to the newly create storage area.

Once complete, go to your PC, launch Outlook and set it up for IMAP connectivity to the same gmail account (http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=77689). Now, if you want to move those files into a .pst file you'll need to create a new PST file and save it and then once you've done that, you can start dragging and dropping those emails from the Storage or Transfer From Mac folder into the newly created PST file.

Not elegant, but functional and free.
posted by smallerdemon at 12:00 PM on June 17, 2010

You can definitely use any IMAP server as the go-between of the two systems, I just considered that since it's work-related, perhaps your employer can provide that server function with Exchange. If not, Google is a great option.
posted by odinsdream at 12:17 PM on June 17, 2010

Thanks. It looks like the process will take a bit of time... Mail is sending all of my older messages, 1 by 1.
posted by punkbitch at 12:44 PM on June 17, 2010