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The new pony express

April 1, 2004

One of the biggest issues in moving to the Mac was being able to move a massive amount of saved e-mail from Outlook 2003 to Entourage.

After looking at a lot of different scripts and utilities to do this, the simplest (not to mention cheapest) alternative was to upload all of the mail, folder by folder, to my mail server with IMAP, and then download it via IMAP onto Entourage.

This works very well—headers, read status, dates, etc. are all preserved doing it in this manner.  I probably moved somewhere in the neighborhood of a gigabyte of mail this way.

The only fly in the ointment is that it can be damn slow—sending passing data from two machines sitting next to each other via a mail server 3000 miles away.  Outlook, in particular, is painfully slow uploading anything with attachments of any substantial size using IMAP.  I’m not sure how much of this was really Outlook’s problem, and how much was related to the upload bandwidth cap on my cable modem, but it did tend to make it a multi-day project.

Oh well—it’s not like the XP box was doing much anyway :-)

If I had it all to do over again, I would set up a local IMAP server, however.



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Written by User ImageChuck Lawson · Filed Under Tech 
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