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Danyll Wills

I have tried the support services of both Microsoft and Netscape but nobody has been able to help me. In fact, one company keeps referring me to the other! I simply want to move my mail from Netscape to Outlook. Is it really that difficult?

Peter Tryde

Hong Kong

Things have become rather complicated recently with Netscape but it still should be possible to find a solution for you. You do not say what version of Netscape you are using but what I shall say is true of Mozilla-Thunderbird and they are the underlying technologies for most versions of Netscape.

For some odd reason, the Mozilla people have been rather slow at producing an 'Export' function for Thunderbird. Import is not a problem.

Most of the people using Thunderbird are more interested in importing than exporting, but there will be users like yourself who will want to move things into Outlook or Outlook Express.

There are lots of solutions but by far the easiest one happens to be both free and very easy to use. Mbox2eml is an application written in Java that you can run, provided you have Java 1.3 installed. If not, get it from the Sun website or many others.

You download a zip file and then extract it usually to the Programs folder of your Windows machine. Be a little careful that you find the right file, make a copy of it and put it somewhere easy to find. You must be able to view 'Hidden Files'.

1 Create a new folder in Program Files and name it 'Utilities'.

2 Click on the folder called 'Documents and Settings'.

3 Under Tools (at the top of the window) click on 'Folder Options'.

4 Click on the tab 'View'.

5 In the window 'Advanced settings' find the box 'Hidden files and folders'. Click 'Show hidden files and folders'.

6 Click the OK box. Now try and find your Thunderbird (or Netscape) inbox.

7 Go to Documents and Settings\xxx\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles (xxx will be your name). You should see one or two folders in the format xxx.default or xxx.yourname. If you have set up your own account, you should see your name.

8 Click on the folder.

9 Click on the folder called 'Mail'. There should be a folder with the name of your main e-mail account.

10 Click on the folder. You should see a file called 'Inbox'.

11 Copy that file, 'Inbox', to the Utilities folder created above.

12 Inside Utilities, create another folder called ImportMail. Now you can run Mbox2eml.

13 When it is up, go to File and click on 'Load Mbox'.

14 Navigate to where the 'Inbox' file is and select it.

15 Once it has read all the mail, click on File again.

16 Click on 'Export All Messages'.

17 Select the folder 'ImportMail'.

Now to launch Outlook Express (or Outlook), go to the ImportMail folder, select all the files and then drag them into the 'Inbox' in Outlook Express.

If you are using an older version of Netscape, you may find that the inbox file is not where Thunderbird now puts it. You should be able to find it without too much difficulty, though. If all else fails, try the search function (but make sure you can see 'hidden' files).

I downloaded and tried the trial versions of several applications that are sold, but they seemed far too complicated. Mbox2eml worked better than one could have hoped for. My test was with only 100 files, so I cannot say how it would work with a 1,000 or 5,000 files. If you do find some kind of problem, you may resolve it by using Thunderbird to create folders and put some mail messages there. One final caution: Do all this work on copies of the files just in case something goes horribly wrong.

If you need to get the Java Runtime module, you can find it here:

http://www.sun.com/java/

The Java application to convert the mbox is here: http://people.freenet.de/ukrebs/mbox2eml.html



There is indeed a way to move Netscape mail to Outlook