This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Moving Your Email
Mail programs on both Mac and Windows are just interfaces for handling mail from servers—so email is really universal itself; it is just the visual interface that differs between Mac and Windows.
To move to a Mac, all you need to do is to take your email settings from your Windows computer and use them to set up Mail on your Mac.
You can, to a limited extent, take old email messages from Outlook Express, Windows Mail, or Outlook and move them to your Mac.
Setting Up Email
In the section "Setting Up Mail" in Chapter 11, we'll look at how to configure Apple's Mail program to connect your mail to a standard POP server. If that is how you get your mail on Windows, from a program like Outlook Express or Windows Mail, you just need to take the information from the Windows side so that you have it ready to enter on the Mac side.
Figure 8.3 shows part of the Outlook Express mail settings. You can get to them by choosing Tools, Accounts and then the Mail tab. You then double-click on the account to get to the settings.
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Figure 8.3 The settings in Outlook Express have basically the same information that you will need for Apple Mail.
You should be able to find server information for incoming mail (POP3) and outgoing mail (SMTP), and an ID and password for both the Incoming Mail Server and Outgoing Mail Server. You will have to click on the Settings button under Outgoing Mail Server to get to those settings. You will not be able to see your password, however, so hopefully you remember it.
These map logically to the Incoming Mail Server, User Name, Password, and Outgoing Mail Server information as well in Apple Mail's accounts. The settings and how to get to them are virtually identical between Outlook Express in Windows XP and Windows Mail in Vista.
Moving Old Messages
You can use the same drag-and-drop strategy as the address book to get old mail messages from Outlook Express or Windows Mail to your Mac—sort of.
If you open one of these mail programs that come with Windows, you can select messages and drag and drop them into a folder on your flash drive. Then you can bring them over to your Mac. They will be .eml files. Each file is a single email message.
At first you can't seem to do anything with them in Mail. Dragging and dropping doesn't produce results. But you can double-click on a .eml file and it will open up in Mail—even the header information is all set just as if you got the email on your Mac.
From there, you can choose Message, Move To and put the message into one of your existing Mail folders. You may want to create a specific folder just for this purpose.
So getting one Windows email to your Mac is a piece of cake. But you can only do one at a time. So one, yes. Twenty, maybe. Four thousand—not really.
A better way to do it is to use an intermediary. You can get a program like Microsoft Entourage on Mac, or Mozilla Thunderbird (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/thunderbird/) to import the .eml messages in bulk. Then you can use the File, Import Mailboxes menu choice in Mail to import the whole lot at once.