I did a consultation recently at a small business that needed a handful of tasks to be completed. One of these was an email transfer from Outlook to Apple Mail. There’s a pretty standard procedure involved in doing this transfer, it’s just time consuming. There was one catch however: this user was switching from Outlook for Mac to Apple Mail. This was not something I had done before, as most of the time the customer is switching from a PC to a Mac, and simply needs their emails/mailboxes/contacts switched over to their new Mac.
The application we normally use to convert the Windows-based Outlook emails to a format Apple Mail can import, called Message Save, is a Windows application, and therefore not suitable for this task. I did some experimenting, and tried simply dragging a mailbox from Outlook onto the desktop. The mailbox populated on the desktop in the format .mbox. I tried not to get my hopes up, because I figured it couldn’t be that easy, but I knew that the .mbox format is what Apple Mail uses for mailboxes.
I opened up Apple Mail, clicked on File -> Import Mailboxes, selected the .mbox file, and it worked! I was very pleased with how simple this process was. From there, I was able to select the rest of the mailboxes within Outlook and drag them all into a folder on the desktop. Apple Mail allowed me to batch import all the mailboxes.
Once they were all imported, I was able to organize them exactly how they were set up in the customer’s Outlook. Mail imports them as sub-mailboxes under a Mailbox named “Import”, but they can easily be dragged out of there, and arranged on the sidebar however you desire.