The phone company I work for is also our ISP, so we get a pretty good deal on DSL. Because of this, the soon-to-be SuperWife (30 days and counting) wants to shut down her AOL account. The only problem is she has five years of email, addresses, and attachments accumulated in her filing cabinet and address book. So now I’m trying to export all this stuff to a format Outlook will accept.
I called AOL customer support, and they said they didn’t think it could be done. I had resigned myself to spending a day logged in to AOL, forwarding the old emails to the new address, and then downloading the messages as the new mailbox filled up, but there appear to be a few utilities out there that may do the job.
The problem is, they all seem a little flaky. There’s AOLeave , but it appears to only work on AOL 5.0. And then there’s the folks at pwcrack.com . All you have to do is send them your AOL personal filing cabinet file, and they’ll send you back an Outlook file (I’m sure that a company called Password Crackers, Inc. would never do anything else with the data you send them, right?)
Has anyone out there managed to export their filing cabinet contents and address book from AOL? She’s using Windows 98 and AOL 8.0.
I extracted about 10 screen names’ and an average of 3 years each from 2 AOL accounts (mine and my girlfriend’s) using QuicKeys and FileMaker (QuicKeys to monotonously copy subject line and To or From header and Body from the AOL Offline Mail screen and then go to next email in a loop; FileMaker to parse the pasted results and convert them into Eudora-compatible text files).
It was quite a kludge. If I’d had a utility that would directly convert the File Cabinet file into text, I’d have used it.
If you are a FileMaker user I will send you my conversion file. You’ll still need QuicKeys or a similar macro program to grab the text from AOL, though.
The other approach, of course, is to look upon this as an opportunity to get rid of a lot of old crap that no one really needs anymore. Sort of like moving to a new house. Most people I know can’t keep up with their current email - they sure as hell never even look at stuff that’s more than a week or two old. Saving the addresses might be worth the effort, but saving old messages and attachments is like carefully packing old newspapers to take to a new house, IMHO.
Thanks for the offer, AHunter3 , but it’s been ten years since I’ve used FileMaker.
Thanks for the advice, Early Out , but she’s already cleaned out most of the junk she doesn’t want to keep. What’s left are the keepsakes and mementos.
Early Out:
Different stokes for different folks, I guess. I enjoy going back and rereading my emails from back when, it’s like a scrapbook.
With the exception of a gap extending from June of 1992 to the end of 1994 (during which I was using AOL 2.x, and I think that back then AOL saved all of your old email on their server and never erased it if you yourself didn’t), I have every email I’ve ever sent and, minus the spam, all that I’ve ever received.
I sincerely believe that you are WAYYYYYYY overengineering this problem. I mean no offense, honest.
I terminated my AOL last fall. I kept what I needed to, in a file folder. I mean, e-mails and such. Addresses are easy, just copy the address files into an email and send them to your new email address, so you can build the new address book.
Now, to the 3 years of emails. This is what CD Burners are for. I would suggest this"
She should keep a CD ROM of AOL 6.0 or 7.0. She doesn’t even have to keep the software ON her computer now, if she doesn’t want to. She can keep the AOL software off of her machine, until such time as she wishes to READ the old AOL Emails…then she can load up the software, read her emails as she wishes. She does not have to have an AOL account to load the software, and having loaded it up, can read her old AOL emails.
Burn them all to a CD, and keep it with the AOL disk. Problem solved, IMHO. In fact, if she wished to keep her PFC intact, she could simply burn the entire AOL folder into a CD. I can’t believe that AOL is larger than 700 Megs…
Cartooniverse
What Cartooniverse said is true, and sufficient unless you want all of your email in one place. I’m happy to have everything in Eudora after years of having email from one era stuck in AOL filing cabinets, email from a later era in Netscape’s In and Out boxes, truly ancient email downloaded to floppy disks from the university mainframe, and only the most recent handful of years in Eudora.
Not everyone is that anal-re umm, is as inclined as I am to find it necessary to have all of their email in one place.
<-------laughing…AHunter3, if you disable the Similies in your Posts, what happens to the Metaphors and Anagrams??
You did raise a great point- but using that CD with all of the AOL E-mails on it won’t slow things down much, she can flip from her HD to the CD_ROM fairly easily.
Jes’ teasin’ ya.
My metaphors are spayed, my friend; they are not fecund and they do not stray from my keyboard to mingle with the terms and clauses of my thread. My anagrams on the other hand are most sneakily riddled with massive stings of malignant viral code (magna ras) for infecting your brain.
[\hijack]
I must be missing something here. I realize that the filing cabinet is stored on the local drive, but how do you access it without logging on?
We now return to the banter in progress…
[hijack]
[BanterLoch9000 ENGAGED!]
The PFC, or Personal Filing Cabinet, is located within the AOL software loaded up on your computer. It is not resident to AOL’s servers. Therefore, ( I love using words like ‘therefore’, it makes me sounds as though I know what the hell I’m talking about ) you can access the PFC anytime. You needn’t be online to use your AOL software.
Many people do what used to be called a “Flashsession” on AOL- especially people whose only Internet access is AOL, but have to pay a toll fee to dial into the service. You set up a Flashsession, dial in and at a fairly high speed, you both send all of your Composed Mail Waiting To Be Sent, and recieve all of the Incoming Emails from AOL. The Emails are then stored in your AOL software files, and you can open, save to PFC, respond, etc- all while offline. When you wanna repeat, you just do another Flashsession.
One can compose emails, embed images in emails and attach documents or images to an email- all offline. That way, your outgoing emails are all ready. If you aren’t doing a Flashsession but have the urge to write whilst offline, when you DO sign onto AOL, your software will prompt you by saying ( paraphrased ),
Very nice.
[BanterLoch9000 DISENGAGED !! ] 
Thanks! I had assumed you needed to be logged in to the service to access the filing cabinet. This should work just fine.
I think we’re ready to cut the cord!
I severed the cord after a 6-year addiction.
Free at last ! Free at last ! Thank Steve Case almighty, I’m Free at Last !!!
Besides, I still have e-mail, AIM and I.E. SuperNelson good luck with it. Hope not a single email is lost.