[TOMMOHAWK_UK]

Hi

I thought I would share this tip with you all.

Now I am sure that many of you are far more experienced with Mac's than I am however there is one problem that I encountered that seems to affect many people like me who convert to using a Mac and that is Outlook.

I invested in a copy of parallels because there are certain windows apps that I want to be able to run and I liked the functionality that parallels provided. However, I did not want to start XP in parallels every time I wanted to check my email in Outlook. I really wanted all my archived email to be accessed easily and quickly.

I spent a while trawling through various forums and everything kept coming up with the same answer and that was to use outlook2mac or similar products that you have to purchase and spend time converting all of your email folders. I didn't want to pay for something that should be easy enough to do with a bit of thought.

And then it struck me! I use Gmail as my main account and I always access it using IMAP because I use multiple devices to access my email depending on where I am. It was Gmail and IMAP that held the solution. I simply created a new IMAP folder in my Gmail account called and then used Outlook to drag my archived folders from the local drive into the IMAP folder. It immediately began to synchronise these folders and then as soon as I had told AppleMail to subscribe to the new folder they immediately became usable in AppleMail - Simple and Free!!

As for security, I then dragged the folders out of the IMAP folder within AppleMail back onto a local folder and deleted them from the IMAP server. Yes it took a while to do but whilst it was uploading the files I was doing other things, there was no user interaction required once the process had started.

I hope this helps someone out there!

Ken

[ciandrews]

Good tip!
funnily enough i was spending yesterday migrating my missus' stuff from her windows laptop to her new (my old ) MacBook, with the main priority being her Outlook Express Inbox. I used a program called dbxconv to convert the dbx files to mbox files which Apple Mail will import.
when I originally got the MacBook, i remember using Mozilla Thunderbird on the PC to go from Outlook to Thunderbird to Entourage (i think!) and that seemed to work well.