I was looking for the easiest way to migrate my email off my aging iBook G3 and onto my new.... gasp.... Dell Inspiron 6400 running Office 2003. After searching Google to see if there were any free or open source solutions that I would trust my data to, I came across a posting that mentioned using IMAP (Internet Message Application Protocol) to do this.
For those of us who don't use IMAP on a regular basis, its a widely supported email protocol that involves leaving your email on the server. Since your email remains on the ISP's server, you can read, manipulate and send email from multiple computers while maintaining all of that activity centrally. This differs from the more common POP (Post Office Protocol) which downloads the email off the ISP's server onto your local machine. Perhaps not so strangely, some ISPs either don't support, or don't advertise, that IMAP support is available. Maybe to save space on their email servers?
So how do you go about using an IMAP account to migrate your emails across? This is the process I went through on both Apple Mail and Entourage in order to migrate my email to the Windows PC running Outlook 2003. Its pretty simple. Note that you will probably end up with some duplicates this way if your POP mail and IMAP mail are the same inbox - I just deleted mine manually:
- I added my IMAP email account to Apple Mail/Entourage on the OS X machine. This was in addition to the existing POP account that I already had setup. These will normally be shown in the mail client interface as a separate set of folders to your normal email (in Apple Mail, a large "@" logo, in Entourage a folder looking like a letter attached to a network)
- For each Inbox and folder I had in Apple Mail and Entourage I created a folder in my IMAP account. For Apple Mail this involved creating a folder in the IMAP account through using Control-Click on the IMAP account, and selecting "New Mailbox". For Entourage through using Control-Click on the IMAP account, and selecting "New Folder"
- I then copied all of the messages in a folder to the matching folder on the IMAP server by selecting all of the messages in my email client (highlighting, or using Apple-A) and dragging the messages across. This process took quite a while for larger folders (i.e. 2000+ messages), and for Apple Mail you don't get any indication of progress except the spinning activity indicator, so you might want to check back after while to see if it is done. For Entourage, you get a progress indicator, and it even seems to work when you start multiple copies at the same time (YMMV)
- I then did what amounts to the reverse process in Outlook on the PC. I set up the IMAP account in Outlook, created folders in my Personal Folders for the email I wanted to categorise, and copied the emails from the IMAP server to the folders I had created
While this process took quite a while to copy the thousands of emails I have, it went fairly smoothly. For the Apple Mail to Outlook migration, all of the emails were copied across without a problem, preserving the dates and formatting. For some reason, the dates on the emails were not preserved during the Entourage to Outlook migration. Annoying? Yes. But hardly a showstopper for me since the email is largely for reference anyway. Enjoy!
