Have checked stickies, have tried MSoft knowledge base, have Googled, could not find answer.
I have an old PC, Win 98, running Microsoft Outlook Express. In Outlook Express I have a mailing list of about 1000 names.
I have a new PC, Win XP Media edition, running Outlook.
I want to transfer the mailing list to my new computer, so that I can use it with Outlook.
I can’t physically connect the two machines, but I can transfer data between the two machines by burning to a CD.
I have not been able to find how to do this. Can anyone help?
I have tried copying my old Outlook Express program and all attendant files to the new PC, putting them in a bespoke folder, and telling Outlook to import the mailing list, but it never sees or finds the folder and returns zero results. I can’t tell it how to find the mailing list file because there’s no provision for me to ‘aim’ its search at the correct folder.
Is the mailing list a distribution list? Or a bunch of individual contacts? Those are usually in a file with, I think, a .MAB extension. It does not usually live with the install files in Programs. You’d have to find that data file (which cannot be opened by double-clicking; you have to open it in a mail client), copy it over to the new machine, and then import. Assuming that you CAN import an OE data file into Outlook.
Edit: I googled -how import outlook express contacts to outlook- and there are a bunch of results at the top that look like the info you need.
Try the info here - down near the end at “Troubleshooting Importing Contacts” seems to be what you need when you have the programs on two different machines:
Thanks Miss Bunny, but I am no further forward. This has nothing to do with individual contacts, nor am I trying to achieve anything with my address book as a whole. It is to do with a single mailing list or distribution list, a file that I believe has an ‘.mab’ extension, although it is hard to be certain about this (Win XP is notoriously reluctant to show me file name extensions, no matter which ‘view’ I select).
I have tried copying Outlook Express and all its associated files and directories over from my old machine to my new. It is at this point that a number of seemingly intractable problems arise:
I cannot get the copied version of Outlook Express (now resident on my new machine) to see or access all the address and mailing list files. It’s as if there are no stored addresses, contacts or mailing lists. I suppose Outlook Express is expecting them to be in a certain place within a certain directory structure, but I don’t know what that is, and whatever it is, it obviously isn’t a permutation that I’ve tried, even though I’ve tried to copy the structure exactly as on my old machine.
If I use the Export function on Outlook Express, it tells me that it can’t perform the operation and/or crashes. If I use the Import function on Outlook, it tells it can’t find anything to import.
Which leaves me up the creek, no paddle. The instructions provided on Msoft’s own knowledge base and on other theoretically helpful sites do not seem to address any of these problems, so far as I can see.