PST archives to Mail.app

Faced with the problem of archiving of emails in a usable format, given that I lose access to Outlook at the end of the week, I went searching for Outlook PST to mbox conversion tips.

Options

1/ find a program that will do it, probably cost money and may take a disproportionate amount of time to work.

2/ Come up with a workaround with bits of other programs.

I chose option 2.

Having read a tip that said the best way to do this was to install Navigator 4 for PC (I didn’t know that Navigator was still available in any format let alone something that would still run) I downloaded the latest version. Navigator 9 doesn’t have the Mail functionality that version 4 had.

Next step, was Thunderbird. Mozilla seem to have rolled this functionality into their new email program.

Importing from outlook was a one step deal. 4gigs of pst formatted emails took 3hours to import.

I copied this folder from thunderbird on the vmware windows xp install to the desktop of the mac.

Mail on snow leopard has the ability to import from thunderbird which is great. It's also a lot faster than I thought. 20 minutes and it was all done and filed. Nice, quick and easy.

Never been more grateful for Mozilla than I was today.

Comments

[David]

This is very helpful to know. I ended up adding an IMAP account within Outlook and drag/dropped to the external account. It's nice to know there is a more graceful way to accomplish this.