Popagandhi

I really wonder what the purpose of a format such as .pst is. I suppose if the format was any more open, freelance fix-its for-the-fabulously-rich like myself (I seem to have carved myself a niche market of random misc computer work for the very rich), wouldn’t have much work to do. How difficult is migrating email to another application on another platform? How hard is migrating mail? It really shouldn’t be. But because Outlook is such a frakkin dog, and 10 years’ worth of Outlook email is a very very big dog, it necessarily makes my life very difficult. Add on to that the constraints present ââ�¬â�� clients don’t understand, and don’t want to understand, why most of the constraints you face have nothing to do with technical aptitude, but rather: your PC is dog slow and your email is a mess (and my life is in danger if any data gets lost?).

Two things: Windows on a MacBook Pro using Parallels was much faster than the original PC, which can’t really do anything other than take 5 minutes to open My Computer). Parallels, instead of Boot Camp, let me work in virtual disks, rather than actually partitioning it, and you can work concurrently in both OSes. Initiating a conversion process on that PC was out of the question ââ�¬â�� it simply wasn’t up to it ââ�¬â�� which was why it had to be done through Windows on a Mac. Locate the .pst files (under Outlook’s Tools-Options-Mail Setup), transfer them to Windows in Parallels (with Outlook installed; Office install needed), populate that fresh copy of Outlook 2003 with the .pst files, in effect creating a mirror of that PC’s Outlook data. Download Outlook2Mac, pay $10 for it (it’s worth it), start converting, and start reading a book. Most solutions found online recommend using Thunderbird for that, but I’m allergic to exporting through another client. Microsoft’s only solution for this is to “do it through an Exchange server”. Well, damn you.

I had to work with 5 .pst files, each nearly 2GB in size. In real world terms, each .pst file contained about 20 000 emails (and that’s only in the inbox, the mail in the other folders were just as significant). At about 7 minutes for every 500 emails, 20 000*5=100 000 mails were in question. I began converting at 1pm, and 9 hours later, I’m still waiting. I doubt there’s a faster way to do this. After Outlook2Mac outputs the resultant .mbox files (I have 136 of them!), transfer them to your Mac partition using either smb (turn on Windows Sharing on the Mac) or Parallels’ Shared Folders. Drop them on the Entourage icon in the dock, and import away. Do the same with the .vcf files for contacts.

As you can imagine, I finished reading Paul Theroux’s Riding the Iron Rooster and felt like a year’s worth of train travel through dirty China might be preferable to converting 10 years of Outlook mail into Entourage. I don’t think I’m ever going to take on a job like that again, even if this one job brings the same amount as what I make monthly at the moment.

To migrate from Outlook Express, one would be much in luck, by comparison. You need only locate the .dbx files, download the free DbxConv, and import the .mbox into Mail.app or Entourage.