After a few suggestions from a friend I eventually found the solution to importing mail from Mozilla into Outlook. It’s a grotesque and hacky travesty of application compatibility, but there you go.
The full instructions are on Google NewsGroups here. In summary, you have to install Eudora 5.x. Eudora can import from Mozilla. Then you use Outlook Express (6) to import from Eudora. (OE says it can only import from versions up to 3, but it lies. 5 works fine, too.) Finally, you use Outlook to import from Outlook Express. (Outlook says that it can import directly from Eudora up to version 4, but it seems to make an incorrect assumption about the location of your Eudora mail store, and won’t allow you to change the import directory.)
You also have to watch the import from Mozilla to Eudora closely, because it seems to occasionally merge huge bundles of messages into a single one. (Open up each folder in Eudora, and look for messages with unusually large file sizes.) At least the bug seems to be consistent: running the import twice in a row will consistently merge the same messages. To get around this, I spent some time shuffling the affected messages around in Mozilla (putting them into different folders), and then re-importing.
Note that you also have to tell Mozilla to Compress its folders (from the File menu). It seems that when you move messages between folders in Mozilla, it just updates the mailbox indexes, not the mailbox files themselves. And it’s the mailbox files that Eudora imports. Compressing the folders forces Mozilla to physically move the messages, and re-index everything.
End-to-end time: about two hours this evening, plus an hour or so scouring the net to find out how to do it in the first place. Thanks, Mozilla. Don’t expect to see me back again.
Just a little extra note about this post. I was equally frustrated by Mozilla/Outlook export-import incompatibility, as I recently lost my hard drive and had to rebuild. In the meantime, I got mail in a fresh copy of Mozilla, but I’ve always preferred Outlook as my main mail prog. Another solution: Select all your messages in Mozilla and send them to yourself as attachments to an email (could do this for multiple folders, as well). Receive the email in Outlook, open it, and then select and save all the attachments (en masse) in a new folder, where they will become MSG files. Buy or use this program (free trial) http://www.pawsthemoment.com/msgtopst/download.shtml to convert all the resulting MSG files to a new PST file, and then import that into the desired folder in Outlook. Done.
I found this in a newsgroup and thought it an accurate and interesting defense of Mozilla…..I would dexcribe the problem as an inadequate “Import” mechanism in Outhouse. After all, Mozilla uses the most widely supported mailbox format there is. Pretty much every client but Outhouse can read the boxes as is, or with the addition of the”mbx” extension. That’s all very nice – however, Mozilla is permanently in a state of development. Right? Every so often it crashes,
stalls or shows some kind of juvenile behavior. THEN it would be nice to have been able to backup mail archives to stodgy, bug prone old Outlook, which for all it’s faults, runs reliably on cold mornings. Possibly a way to export mail as Communicator files, which Outlook is able to import?
Mozila/Netscape 7 Mail is IN the exact same format Communicator and most other email clients. The problem is that MS decided to set up their import tool to identify the file type by what
programs are installed, and not by what kind of file is available. Any decent Import tool will let you import File types, and not just from specific Clients.
This isn’t a case of MS bashing; it’s an accurate desciption of poor engineering. Really. Outlook’s Import tool is simply inadequate for importing mail from a wide assortment of clients- the 80% of mail clients that use the unix “mbox” format.
Mozilla saves mail as plain text documents in your .default directory.
This makes it VERY easy to convert/import/export mail, and makes Mozilla (and Netscape’s) mail probably the most friendly and usable email client out there.
Of course, Mozilla’s mail is stored in this locically cool way to make it platform independant. Too bad that Outlook and OE can’t deal with real email directly (in its raw format), since it’s the way in which these applications receive mail themselves.
Shame on them, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Mozilla.
“Mozilla saves mail as plain text documents in your .default directory.”
The closest thing I can find to a “.default” directory on my (Windows 98) system is C:\Program Files\mozilla.org\Mozilla\defaults, and there’s no sign of plain text documents there.
It’s not that I want to convert to the Evil Empire’s mail client; I want to export mail to something I can then import into Lotus Agenda (that sure dates me.
Help?
I’m afraid I don’t have a Windows 98 system to hand, but I think the data would probably be saved not under Program Files, but under C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\somewhereorother.
Curiously, after having gone through the pain of converting from Mozilla to Outlook, I’m currently very tempted by Thunderbird, the new standalone version of the Mozilla mail client. (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/) It’s kinda pretty good.
Hello there,
seems like a small firm has made the effort to write a utility which can read the mozilla mail files and store the mails in Outlook Express’ .EML format. These files can be simply drag&dropped into Outlook Express.
And Outlook itself can get them from Outlook Express.
Has anybody an idea why they don’t import them to Outlook directly?
The utility can be downloaded from ‘http://www.complices.de/produkte.html’.
I’ve just had to do this all because one of our managers really wanted to us all to use Exchange which they’ve set up so it only works in some weird M$ mode (no Pop server) so only Outlook understands what the hells its trying to send. I resent having to move from my nice portable and exploit free Mozilla to this bloated heap of cr*p with its thousand calender functions and “shared” folder options I’m never going to use. For years every time I installed Microsoft Office I purposefully left out Outlook of the install and now I’m being forced to use it … AARGGH!!!!
Thanks for this though, as I was trying to send my old mails through to it and have finally got them imported via the Eudora-Outlook Express route