Having received my Mac the first task I had was to migrate my e-mail, contacts, and appointments. On my notebook I have been using Outlook 2003, so the plan was to switch to Microsoft's equivalent program on the Mac. The first issue was finding what that product was called. I had incorrectly thought that it would still be called Outlook... With some googling I became familiar with the Entourage product, the mail/contacts/appointments program in Office 2004 for Mac.
As we have licenses for Office for Mac I installed the suite which was a very pleasant process compared to the same process on a PC. Insert the CD start the installer and the hard work is all done. Before I could get up the installer was finished. Having used a PC for so long I am used to the hours of waiting while office installs and registers everything...
With Entourage installed the next step was to migrate my data from Outlook 2003. Cant be that difficult I thought to myself, after all it is Microsoft -> Microsoft. Open Entourage, which looks great its not just a simple port of Outlook, and then start looking for import. Entourage can import mail from csv files, mbox, earlier versions of office for Mac, but not any of the Outlook for Windows products. Ok... Goggle time.
There are several ways of performing this migration.
- MacUser has a very convincing article noting that Microsoft has released a converter. When you get to the Microsoft site you find that it can only import from previous Mac versions.
- mvp.org has a page that lists a few options including using an IMAP or Exchange server neither of which I had access to. They also offer links to some scripts to do this. These seem overly complex for the task in my opinion.
- There is a product called O2M. For $10 this is a good option. It can transport mail, contacts, appointments, etc. from Outlook to mbox, iCal, etc formats that you can then import on the Mac. I used the trial version but was too cheap to purchase it for the one off transfer of data.
The approach that I used is explained by Dave Riches and also on the O'Reilly Network. This process involves converting the e-mail in your Outlook PST file into individual mbox files that can then be imported into Entourage.
The process that I followed best matches Dave's process.
- Install Thunderbird, which has the ability to import PST files and internally it stores its mail as mbox files.
- Copy files to Mac
- Drag mbox files into Entourage
The process is simple enough except that I arrange my mail into a hierarchy of folders. When you import your mail into Thunderbird it will create a folder for each mail folder in Outlook. Each of these folders then contains its subfolders and a mbox file with the mail from that folder. There was no way that I was going to drag all of these individual files into Entourage. However, the files are now just simple text files and can therefore be altered via the command line.
The first thing that I decided to do was to compact some of my folder hierarchies. I did this at a Command Prompt on my Windows machine. The command to do this is:
(for /F "delims=" %i IN ('dir /s /b *.') DO @type "%i") > NewMailFile.mboxExecute this command in the folder that you want to compress the mbox files into. In my case I kept a folder with all of my internet site subscription e-mails (like blogger, feedburner, bloglines, etc). I have subscribed to many sites! I executed this command in the folder containing my "Internet Sites" mailbox, compressing these into a single mbox file.
At this point I copied all of the mbox files to my Mac. Thunderbird does not add an mbox extension to its files and unfortunately Entourage will only import them if they have the mbox extension. The following command run at the Mac Terminal, in the directory where you copied your mail files and folders.
find . -type f -print -exec mv "{}" "{}.mbox" \;With this done you can now drag each of the mbox files into Entourage. The import is complete.
With my mail in Entourage I then proceeded to transfer my contacts and appointments. As I use a PDA I did this by syncing Outlook with my PDA and then syncing the PDA with Entourage. In order to do this I purchases PocketMac Pro. Once I got it installed and followed the instructions it synced all of my contacts and appointments. PocketMac itself worked for a couple of days but lately it has stopped working. I'm not sure what else I have installed that could cause this problem and the PocketMac support is very slow. If this is not resolved soon I am going to try The Missing Sync for Windows Mobile, v2.0, unfortunately they don't have a trial version otherwise I would have switched sooner. (If anyone has any advice on this let me know...)
4 comments:
A long time ago, I stopped using Outlook. I use Thunderbird for most of my email needs (except on the Mac, but I'll come back to that).
When it came time to export from Outlook to Thunderbird, I found that it was NOT an easy process. In the end, I found the easiest way to do this was to Outlook Express (that's right) to import from Outlook, then export to a format Thunderbird could handle. I don't know why, but Outlook Express appears to have far better import and export support than Outlook itself. This may have improved recently, but that was my experience about a year ago. Since then, I only use Thunderbird.
Except on the Mac.
On of the things I love about the Mac is the way apps integrate. If you use the Macs Address Book app, those addresses are available to the Mail app and iCal etc. It's just a pity that the default Mail application on the Mac is so poor. It just doesn't have half the features I enjoy in Thunderbird. And for whatever reason, Thunderbird on the Mac does not have access to Address Book. This, for me, is the main reason I don't don't do all of my emailing from the Mac. I had not tried Entourage, but perhaps I should give it a go.
In the mean time, I'm watching a couple of projects over at the Mozilla group. Lightning is a project to integrate Sunbird (Mozillas Calendar app) with Thunderbird. Part of the goals of this project is to introduce device sync support to Thunderbird. I would LOVE to bring my PDA out of retirement. Since I stopped using Outlook, my PDA has been gathering dust :(
Another Mozilla project isn't really a project at all. Somebody filed a bug report about a year ago regarding Thunderbirds lack of integration with the Mac Address Book. It's been lurching in fits and starts since then, but has so far failed to become a viable addition to the Thunderbird code base. But since there's only one person working on this...
I just hope it gets somewhere. If I could get Thunderbird running on the Mac using Address Book like it should, I'd be a happy little camper ;)
BTW, exporting addresses from Thunderbird (Mac or Win) and importing them into Address Book was trivial. But then I didn't try to copy my mail messages, just the contact lists.
no access to an exchange server andrew?
i coulda helped you there i think
I switched over last year as I was doing lots of web development and needed to "see the other side". I really like the Mac, but need to continue doing Windows development. So at last I now have a MacBook and can finally ditch the two lappies for the one as Parallels works so well for Visual Studio.
So now's the time for the big migration to move years of calendar data, gigabytes of emails (OK, lots are 'funnies', but there's a lot of business too), and thousands of contacts.
I will have to use the Exchange method as it seems it's the only feasible and least grief migration path. I'm just *so* chuffed that I'll need to spend a day installing a Windos server, AD, Exchange... yuck, I'd rather go to the dentist.
It is astounding that MS just couldn't give a damn about their customers. They fill their Office products full of rubbish that'll never be used (can someone shoot the manager who approved that paper clip), yet omit vital migration tools. Maybe it's that idiot manager again?
OK, whinge over, but for me it just reinforces my decision to cut the cord. It's also really satisfying to see that the open source community are finally getting their act together and will genuinely give the Office group some competition.
Give it a year and we'll all be able to dump Office on the Mac. Justice. Nice.
not to slam this whole thing, but if you exported your mail, contacts and calendar to comma separated values, wouldn't you be able to import them directly into enterage? I am going to test this and will respond later, but why make things so complicated??? running that simple script and another one seems above the heads of "normal" users.
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