managing mail - imapsize

So I just switched to outlook this week after a longstanding fear of MS products kept me on elm, pine, eudora and thunderbird all these years. Outlook is pretty fun now that I've acclimated. Transferring all my old mail (so far I have everything in back to 2001) was pretty easy once I figured out the procedure, which I will share here in case anyone sharing my plight needs it.

Fortunately, I've always used mail clients that store mail in the UNIX "mbox" format. it seems pretty standard, however, Outlook 2003 and 2007 apparently wont directly import this format.

So step one is to convert it to something else, namely EML. I found a program called imapsize which contains this function. (although it does other things too) the conversion was pretty easy: find a mailbox file (the correct ones wont have a file extension, ie: "inbox") Next add the extension ".mbox" to it. then convert it with the mbox2eml tool. It spits out a folder full of EMLs.

The next step is to get the EMLs into something else. Apparently Outlook 2003/2007 wont do it.. at least not in a good way. BUT Outlook express will. You just make a folder in Outlook Express, select all of your EML files in explorer and then drag them into the folder you made. It builds a table of contents, and you're good to go.

Once I had all those in, I needed to get them into Outlook 2007. This part is easy: just use the import tool.

All done. Now I can see all my spam from 2001. lol.