Just got a new iMac, and have been having fits over email. On my old Windows box, I’d been using Outlook. Apparently, there’s no direct and pain-free method of moving from Outlook on a PC to anything on a Mac.
So far, the best I’ve managed is to have Mozilla inhale my .pst files on the PC, then grab the files it creates, slap .mbox on the end and move 'em to the Mac, where Entourage can suck them in.
The question is: Do I want to stick with Entourage, or should I persist and eventually bully Mail into accepting my old mail files? I’ve heard enough bad things about each app to make me think that I should keep the PC running for email.
My email needs are simple - I just need something that will talk to my ISP’s POP servers. They do a spiffy job on their end at clobbering spam so I really don’t need much in the way of spam filtering. About the closest I get to exotic is routing inbound mail to different folders based on the sender.
Mail has been working OK so far, but it’s the issue of getting my Outlook mail into it that’s the killer.
Mail has the advantage of being the best integrated with the other Apple tools, if you choose to use them (calendar, contacts, etc.) Most programs on the Macintosh that have an interface to a mail program will work with Mail. Until OS X came out, I always used Eudora on the Macintosh (which I can heartily recommend), but now I use Mail.
From your requirements description, Mail will do everything you need it to do.
food for thought:
Not being able to keep the old e-mails might be a blessing in disguise! Do you really need all those old e-mails? The larger the archive, the slower your e-mail program can become. Is there a way you can extract all the e-mails to text files and keep them in a separate folder for searching purposes? I’ve changed e-mail programs a few times in the past, and the couple of times that I couldn’t import the old e-mails into the new program, it was somewhat of a relief to start with a brand-new, uncluttered inbox.
I need the information out of probably 2% of the emails that get past my ISP’s spam filters, and the past two weeks have been irritating as I keep having to go back to the PC to find something in a message.
Whether or not it’s attached to an email program, or simply out there for Spotlight to index probably doesn’t matter. I’ll have to mess with Outlook’s export functions to see if any produce a useful file. (Based on the Outlook running on my work PC, I’d have to work out the options - what does email exported to Excel look like, for instance?
Eek, just tried that, and it crams MOST of an email’s body into Column B of a spreadsheet. No good. Tab-separated DOS text seems to be OK, at least. Ugly, but nothing seems to be truncated, other than attachments. If there’s anything I really need, I could just forward the message to myself from the PC, then pick it up on the Mac.
Looks like I’ll stick with Mail and have Outlook on the old PC export text files. The less I’m using MS products, the better I feel.
Yes, attachments are tricky. I would recommend searching for all e-mails with attachments, and then take a quick look to see which attachments you need to keep, and saving those outside of the e-mail program. Whenever I changed e-mail programs, even if I was able to transfer some of the e-mails to the new program, the links to the attachments were still lost, and I had to hunt through my attachments folder.
Good look with Mail! If you go far enough, you can put a “Microsoft-free zone” sticker on your computer, to astonish the people for whom Microsoft and PCs are inseparable.
Good question!
There are lots of email programs for the Mac (and zillions for the PC). My 3 of choice, but it is a hard choice are Thunderbird, Mail (the Apple app), and Eudora. I have been fully committed to each one in turn. I use Mail at home and Thunderbird at work. I have found Mail to be the easiest to use, least likely to require thought. Thunderbird has the advantage of being the newest and has lots of features. Eudora has so many features it suffers from bugs as a result. Again I like em all. My recommendation is probably Thunderbird, but since I can’t seem to follow my own advice…
Moving mail into any of these programs seems easy, but the advice of the other poster (do you really want to keep all that mail?) is good advice. Consider importing the mail then stuffing the old mailboxes. That keeps the mail relatively close but not slowing things down.
I use Mail at home and Thunderbird at work. I have found Mail to be the easiest to use, least likely to require thought. Thunderbird has the advantage of being the newest and has lots of features. Eudora has so many features it suffers from bugs as a result. Again I like em all. My recommendation is probably Thunderbird, but since I can’t seem to follow my own advice…