Success Story of Don Zurstadt

I made a road trip and needed to use my laptop, which runs with Vista, to temporarily do my email. The obvious tool to use with Vista was Windows Mail. Ordinarily I use Outlook 2007 on my XP desktop computer. When I got home from the trip I had over 80 emails that I wanted to import from Windows Mail on the laptop into Outlook on my desktop.

After I found that Microsoft does not provide for easily importing and exporting between two computers, I starting looking for a solution, especially since this need might reoccur. EML to PST came to my attention via a Google search, and I downloaded a trial version. However by this time I had already spent half a day trying to install an old copy of Outlook 2000 on the Vista laptop with the sole purpose of getting Windows Mail to export a .pst file – all to no avail (Outlook 2000 is no longer supported by Microsoft, and multiple workarounds suggested on the Internet were all dead ends). So ultimately the prospect of spending $14.95 [ special offer coupon ] for a working solution looked pretty good. I did first verify, using the trial version, that EmlToPst really would convert an email with attachments to a .pst that I could open in Outlook 2007. And in the end, I feel like you rescued me from a terrible nightmare at a bargain price.

Conversion of Windows Mail folders to Outlook

I have not tried too much more than the simple conversion of a tree of Windows Mail folders to a single .pst file. The awkward part was that I only wanted part of the Windows Mail folders – Inbox and Sent Items – so I had to make a copy of the tree and delete the unwanted folders before doing the conversion. Then EmlToPst put all the converted folders into the new .pst with its own super-header and then under its Inbox folder with all the original categories, including Inbox, repeated under that. It was no big deal to then copy the emails from this subtree into their respective categories in my real Outlook 2007 tree, but this would not be too much fun if I had to do it very often. If there is a direct way to automatically “synchronize” email from Windows Mail to Outlook 2007, putting everything properly from folder to respective folder, then that is not clear to me at this point. [ suggestion: just disable the root folder creation option ] As it was, however, I was only too pleased to get the emails and their attachments copied over and intact, even if it did require a number of manual operations (which might, I should add, be difficult or impossible for those with limited experience in these matters).

Thanks for a “life-saver”.

Don Zurstadt