How can I read or import an old Microsoft email account on my Mac?

January 20, 2022 5:50 PM

I have a folder from an old Microsoft Entourage for Mac account. It's from an old backup drive I haven't touched in years. I'd like to browse those old emails, but I don't own any Microsoft apps, and Apple's Mail app can't import them even though the database is a .mbox file. I've tried opening the file in a text editor, but most of the data is jumbled. Any ideas?

None of this is critical. If it's lost, it's lost. I just thought I'd make sure there wasn't anything I'd want to save before I wipe out the drive.

posted by 2oh1 to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

If you’re following Apple’s directions on how to import it and that’s not working, I’d guess it’s not really in mbox format. That’s easy enough to tell in a text editor since the mbox format is literally plain text. If you try to look at it in TextEdit or BBEdit or whatever editor is your choice, it’s either going to look like email after email (headers included), or it’ll be some amount of gibberish. If it’s gibberish then the file is likely in a proprietary format even though it has the mbox filetype. The challenge would be figuring out what format it’s in instead.
posted by fedward at 6:20 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

In a Terminal window, if you run file on it, what does it report?

(That is, open the Terminal application, type the word file, a space, then drag the mbox on the Terminal window, then hit enter)
posted by Monochrome at 6:49 PM on January 20, 2022

Response by poster: > If it’s gibberish then the file is likely in a proprietary format even though it has the mbox filetype.

It's some text with tons and tons and tons of gibberish.

> The challenge would be figuring out what format it’s in instead.

It's from an old version of Microsoft Office Entourage
posted by 2oh1 at 6:52 PM on January 20, 2022

Response by poster: > In a Terminal window, if you run file on it, what does it report?

Terminal says "data"
posted by 2oh1 at 6:54 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

If your Mac can still run 32-bit apps (macOS Mojave or earlier) then I would get Microsoft Office:Mac 2008 with Entourage from an abandonware site like Macintosh Garden.
posted by Monochrome at 7:10 PM on January 20, 2022 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: > If your Mac can still run 32-bit apps (macOS Mojave or earlier) then I would get Microsoft Office:Mac 2008 with Entourage from an abandonware site like Macintosh Garden.

HHhmmmmm... I'm running Monterrey, but I have an old backup drive I've been meaning to disassemble & recycle. I could wipe it out and install Mojave on it. That's a bit more of a project than I was hoping for, but what the heck. I could do that while watching football this weekend. It's worth a shot.
posted by 2oh1 at 10:29 PM on January 20, 2022

Internet says that Entourage natively used its own format with the .rge extension, and that was a container holding .mbox files for each folder. That doesn’t match up with my memory of my brief experience using very early versions of Entourage, but I don’t know if that’s my memory being faulty or if the container format came in a later version. If you can’t get to a working installation of any version of Entourage, Outlook 2011 supposedly could import Entourage data so that might be a useful Plan B.
posted by fedward at 2:35 PM on January 21, 2022 [1 favorite]

I haven't had to do this in a verrrrry long time but I'm pretty sure that the last time I did, I used Emailchemy. It's $30 but you can test out the demo first. I don't recall there being a free/open source/command line tool that groks Entourage's weird file formats.
posted by bcwinters at 8:00 AM on January 22, 2022