Hot Damn! I figured out the Vista Mail / OE6 Import Problem!

  • Thread starter Thread starter jwardl
  • Start date Start date
J

jwardl

FINALLY made it work! Here's what you do:

As you might expect, copy all your .dbx folders to wherever. Now, open Vista
Mail. Go to
File - Import - Messages

Next, select "Microsoft Outlook Express 6", and NEXT
Since "Import mail from an OE6 Identity" will be shadowed out, accept what
you see by clicking "OK."

Browse to the drive/directory with a single left click to the correct
folder. Now, notice that your chosen directory name is not only shown on the
directory tree, but is also typed into the "Folder:" field at the bottom.
Place a backslash into this field ahead of the directory name -- THIS IS
WHAT MAKES IT WORK -otherwise, the directory path will come out wrong in the
next step. For those of you still confused, the backslash is the "\", not
the "/".

Next, click "Select Folder." It's at the bottom center with a little down
arrow next to it. From there, it's NEXT, ALL FOLDERS (or those you choose),
and away you go!

Note that all your messages will be imported into a newly created folder
called, of course, "Imported Folder." The original OE6 structure will remain
intact here, and the messages can be selected and moved into the Vista Mail
folders, should you wish. If you do this, and have lots of messages, your
message list may rapidly bounce up & down for some time while the move is
taking place. It's ok -- just open a new window & do something else while
the copy operation is running.

Enjoy, all!
 
In RC1 I just pointed the import directory to the OE6 dbx directory and that
was it (browsed directly to the OE6 folder)...
 
Work around
Copy your messages from OE6 to a folder as they are .eml
then copy the eml files to the default location in vista
Vista does not use the .dbx format for messages any more
all your messages are stored as .eml
 
Copying to a directory may not work. But you can drag the eml files and
drop them into a WinMail window to incorporate them just as in OE. And the
reverse works also.

steve
 
That didn't work for me because I have Vista on a completely separate hard
drive (even a different controller) to avoid any cross-contamination to my
XP install. I turn off the XP-drive controller in BIOS when booting to
Vista.

Your point is valid, however.
 
jwardl said:
That didn't work for me because I have Vista on a completely
separate hard drive (even a different controller) to avoid any
cross-contamination to my XP install. I turn off the XP-drive
controller in BIOS when booting to Vista.
Click to expand...

Woohoo...it worked for me!

I've been scratching my head over this one for a week, and the drag
and drop worked perfectly. I just highlighted the messages (some 8500
of them) on my D drive and dragged them to my inbox. They were copied
from that drive into Windows Mail properly and in about two minutes I
had all 8700 messages sitting there.


Thanks for the tip Steve...never even thought about dragging them
over.

Copying the files into the folder didn't work for me either, but drag
and drop worked.
 
In schreef jwardl:
FINALLY made it work! Here's what you do:

As you might expect, copy all your .dbx folders to wherever. Now,
open Vista Mail. Go to
File - Import - Messages

Next, select "Microsoft Outlook Express 6", and NEXT
Since "Import mail from an OE6 Identity" will be shadowed out, accept
what you see by clicking "OK."

Browse to the drive/directory with a single left click to the correct
folder. Now, notice that your chosen directory name is not only shown
on the directory tree, but is also typed into the "Folder:" field at
the bottom. Place a backslash into this field ahead of the directory
name -- THIS IS WHAT MAKES IT WORK -otherwise, the directory path
will come out wrong in the next step. For those of you still
confused, the backslash is the "\", not the "/".

Next, click "Select Folder." It's at the bottom center with a little
down arrow next to it. From there, it's NEXT, ALL FOLDERS (or those
you choose), and away you go!

Note that all your messages will be imported into a newly created
folder called, of course, "Imported Folder." The original OE6
structure will remain intact here, and the messages can be selected
and moved into the Vista Mail folders, should you wish. If you do
this, and have lots of messages, your message list may rapidly bounce
up & down for some time while the move is taking place. It's ok --
just open a new window & do something else while the copy operation
is running.
Click to expand...

It doesn't work like it should: the account column is empty for imported messages.
 
Steve said:
And if you need to go back from WinMail to OE, you can do the opposite.
Click to expand...

OE? What's that, some demented form of Outlook Express?

ACK! :-)

My regular email client is Eudora, and I use Agent for newsgroups.
Vista's mail program is decent, but the rest of Vista is years away from
stable, consistent, and reliable.

Whatever you do, don't read my posts about Vista in the general group.
It may annoy people who think Vista is "cool" and worthy of use. They
haven't fixed XP yet, nevermind Vista...so don't go there.

:-)
 
Don't worry. I won't.

Bill said:
OE? What's that, some demented form of Outlook Express?

ACK! :-)

My regular email client is Eudora, and I use Agent for newsgroups.
Vista's mail program is decent, but the rest of Vista is years away from
stable, consistent, and reliable.

Whatever you do, don't read my posts about Vista in the general group.
It may annoy people who think Vista is "cool" and worthy of use. They
haven't fixed XP yet, nevermind Vista...so don't go there.

:-)
Click to expand...
 
Steve Cochran said:
Yup, but some are reporting that the import was only partially successful.
Click to expand...

I found that all messages in all mail folders from before about July 2004 were not imported, without an error message.

BTW, mail programs shouldn't be tied to the operating system, so we wouldn't have to convert everything with each new version of Windows. I just converted everything from OE4 to OE6 2 years ago.
And the bulky "failure proof" indexing system shouldn't be built into a mail program, but be a part of the operating system.
 
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