Moving emails from outlook express to mail

Question

is there a way to get all of my old emails from outlook express to mail? My old PC is about to die and then I'll loose all of my emails :s that is why I am wondering if there is a solution, now.

Answer 1

I don't know whether you can do this on a PC version of Outlook Express or not, but I know that you can do stuff like this with Apple's Mail, so it may be worth a shot to try this and see if it works.
First off, I am assuming that all this old mail is a POP account, and not IMAP. If it were IMAP, it would all be safe on your email account provider's IMAP server and all you would have to do is create the new account in Apple Mail and the first time you connected, it would autosync with the server and all your old mail would just be there. But if POP, all mail is downloaded to your computer then deleted from the server. So, assuming this to be a POP account, here is what I would try to do if I were you.
1. Go to http://webmail.aol.com and sign up for a new free IMAP email account from AOL. You could get a free gmail account if you wanted, too, but I believe there is a bit of extra configuration involved in making it a IMAP and not POP. AOL is IMAP by default. Plus, AOL is a built-in new-account setup option in Apple Mail.
2. On the PC in Outlook Express, add a new account for your new AOL email account. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/883081 to find out all the particulars about account settings and how to do it in Outlook Express.
3. On the Mac in Apple Mail, as stated in #1 above, AOL Mail is one of the options when creating a new account. Just follow Mail's "new account wizard" to create your AOL account there.
4. On the Mac, create a second new account for your existing POP account. Mirror the individual mail folder layout that are on your old PC for the old POP account.
5. This is the part that I don't know if PC Outlook Express will let you do, but I know that Apple Mail does:
(a) Open each of your mail folders in the old POP account stored on your dying hard drive one at a time
(b) Highlight/select all the messages in that folder
(c) Drag them to the AOL inbox. In Apple Mail, they would be copied to the IMAP server, preserving all the original "From" and "Date Received" and other information like that.
6. On the Mac, drag the messages that you uploaded into the AOL inbox and drop them into the appropriate folder of the "legacy" POP account that you created in #4. That will clear them out of the AOL inbox and they will now be stored on your computer as downloaded popmails.
7. Go back to step #5 and repeat this process for each of your folders on the old PC until you have emptied all the messages off your old computer.
Now, I will have to issue a disclaimer that I have only done this myself from IMAP to IMAP and to/from IMAP from/to "On My Mac" folders, which keeps copies of messages locally but not on IMAP servers. So I have no reason to suspect that this would not apply equally to POP since it worked with "On My Mac" folders. And whether the PC's Outlook Express will support the POP-to-IMAP drag-and-drop is a total unknown to me.
I'm sure I'll hear back via this forum whether this worked or not, but it's the best idea that I can come up with, and like I said, a similar (but not identical) situation worked for me before.