Another email question (PC to Apple)

[foodcoma]

Hi all,

I just purchased a new macbook air yesterday and am trying to move my emails over from my pc laptop. The emails in my pc laptop (outlook) have been converted into mbox format using O2M and moved over to the macbook air. I have a couple of questions below:

Os there anyway to view the emails in mbox format without importing them to entourage? I can only view the first few lines of the email in the mbox files using textedit but they seem to be ok if I port them over to entourage. I would ideally like to leave them archived and only view them using some "mbox viewer" program, if possible?

Separately, I seem to have problems porting / reading foreign language emails. They all appear as gibberish. Anyone else having this problem?

Thanks!

 

[plinden]

Well, the best "mbox viewer" is an email application. You could import them into Apple Mail (File/Import Mailboxes -> select "mbox files") - if you only use Entourage you wouldn't be bothered then by the email cluttering it up, and you could just open Mail when you need to view them. Or Thunderbird would work.

Foreign language emails are likely stored as UTF-8 and wouldn't be viewable in TextEdit, but the encoding would be specified in the emails in the mbox file and they should be viewable in Mail.

 

[foodcoma]

Thanks for the quick reply. I am actually trying to avoid importing those emails into my entourage and just want to keep them mainly as an archive. So, it would be very helpful if I can just open those mbox files and view them, as and when I need to look for stuff.

On the issue of emails written in a foreign language (Chinese, in this case), I'm unfortunately unable to read imported emails from PC as they appear in gibberish. Tried to select different character sets in entourage but it didn't work.

 

[aristobrat]

FWIW, the Apple Mail program plinden was referring to is separate program than Entourage. If you import your mbox stuff into a local folder on the Mail app, it shouldn't touch anything in your Entourage.

 

[foodcoma]

FWIW, the Apple Mail program plinden was referring to is separate program than Entourage. If you import your mbox stuff into a local folder on the Mail app, it shouldn't touch anything in your Entourage.

Oh, i see. Just got my mac yesterday and it's my first day playing with it. Thanks

When I open the Apple Mail program, it asks me to create an account for it. Should I use the same account as I used in entourage or will that create a conflict?

 

[plinden]

You can use the same account as long as you're not using POP (you can still have multiple email clients using POP, but mail would be downloaded into whatever one is active and would no longer be available on the other client)

 

[aristobrat]

Oh, i see. Just got my mac yesterday and it's my first day playing with it. Thanks

When I open the Apple Mail program, it asks me to create an account for it. Should I use the same account as I used in entourage or will that create a conflict?

No worries about your first day. Moving email around is (hopefully) one of those one-time things to get setup and then you can really start enjoying your Mac.

The Mail program (in your Applications folder) requires you to setup at least one email account with it. Like plinden said, as long as you don't setup your existing account in Mail as a POP3 account, you should be fine.

I just ran a test import of a very simple mbox export on my Mail, and it created a local folder ("On My Mac") and put the imported folder there.

 

[foodcoma]

Thanks I tried importing the mbox files into Apple mail and it worked. Much appreciate your help!

The emails in other languages still show up as gibberish but I suppose I'll have to live with that for a while. Good thing they're only a small portion of my emails