Switchy Mailbox

A reader writes:

Dear Mr. McSwitchenstein , Do you have any advice one how to migrate archived emails stored in a .pst file to a Mac? I have about 2 GB of archived email that I would need to migrate in order to switch myself over at work. (I don't yet have an opportunity to move all of my email to the cloud.) Thanks, Juana B. A. Switcher II

This is a great question and one that I've pondered for a long time. There is a business opportunity for someone here.

First of all: switching to the cloud is no longer difficult for a moderately technical user. Get a Gmail account, enable IMAP, connect to that account via IMAP in Outlook, and just copy folders wholesale from your PST to the IMAP account. 2Gb is not a lot of mail these days to copy into the cloud for free. And once you've put it in Gmail, Google looks after it and makes it easy to get it elsewhere.

There might be other reasons you're stuck cloudless, though. Perhaps you're not permitted to store that information with a third-party host. Perhaps, like ol' Switchy, you've got 12Gb of mail in PST format which you can't afford to host in the ether.

Seems to me that you've got two options:

1. Convert those PSTs to mbox format and import them wherever you want

mbox is the most basic format for email storage. It mirrors the RFC 2822 format for email messages, which in turn is still used as the wire format for SMTP mail delivery. mbox is the ASCII of email; it's ancient, primitive, current, universally understood, and thus a perfect archival format.

How to convert PSTs to mbox? First of all, you have to have a copy of Outlook which can open the PST. Secondly, you're going to need proprietary software—none of which I've tried or can recommend. Things like MessageSave look like they'd do the job, but I can't vouch for them. Try searching for "PST to mbox".

2. Keep a copy of Outlook around

This isn't as convenient as actually moving your Outlook mail to your current email client, but if all you want is a long-term solution for accessing your mail archives then a virtualization product like VMWare or Parallels could well suffice. Keep your VM image handy with Windows and Outlook, and your PC format mail archives will be accessible long beyond your switch.

There's one more possibility which is worth mentioning. The next version of Microsoft Office for Mac will no longer ship with Entourage but instead a first-class version of Outlook for Mac. It's entirely possible that Outlook for Mac will read PSTs and be able to export them into Mail.app. Fingers crossed.