import from mail

N

Nevilleh

I have been asked by management to switch from Apple's Mail app to
Entourage.
I have Office Mac 2004 std edition installed.
An import from Mail option was available and I imported my messages
from Mail to Entourage - or so I thought. In the Entourage folder pane
there was my list of folders (for each client / project etc) - some
folders were missing and some emails within folders were not imported)
It seems that Entourage failed to import any folders and emails created
from the end of Sept 2005! (This may be when I updated to Tiger).

I then dragged a folder from Mail to my desktop and created a
folder.mbox file. I then dragged this onto the Entourage folder pane
and it was imported - however while the .mbox file contained for
example 10 email messages - The same folder imported into Entourage
contained 7 - the missing emails were ones created after the end of
September 2005!

I am pulling my hair out at this point. My std edition CD does not have
the value pack / utility folder with the import from Mail script talked
about on the web by user who have had similar problems.

My Office has been updated to v 11.2.1

Can anyone suggest what I do now.
regards Neville
 
M

Michel Bintener

Hi,

I'll start with a couple of comments which will hopefully explain the
situation you're currently in: with Tiger, Apple modified the way Mail
stores its email messages. In pre-Tiger versions, Mail stored its messages
in standard .mbox files; however, to enable Tiger's Spotlight to search
them, Mail now stores its messages individually as .emlx files, which can be
found in <your user name>/Library/Mail/<name of the account>/<name of the
folder>/Messages. Entourage 2004 was released roughly a year before Tiger
came out; it doesn't take into consideration the changes that were made in
Tiger. This explains why the import function is not as reliable as it should
be.

Also, the import script you've mentioned is for Entourage v.X only, which
didn't include the Mail import function when it was shipped. It would not
help you since you've already got its functionality built into Entourage
2004 as part of the import tool.

One solution that seems to work for a number of users is to use Automator
(or any other batch renaming tool) and rename all extensions of the messages
in Mail's folder (path described above) from .emlx to .eml. Once that
conversion's over, you should be able to drag the .eml files into Entourage.
I would strongly recommend that you try this on a *copy* of the Mail folder,
just in case things go terribly wrong. I cannot guarantee any kind of
success with that method; it did work for me when I had to transfer a couple
of messages, but I'm not sure if it works for everybody.

Hope this helps
Michel
 
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