I’ve recently had to export a bunch of emails from Entourage and into Outlook, in order to send them to someone in a format they can browse and read on a PC. You’d think that exporting a selection of emails from one Microsoft email management tool to another would be easy, right? Sadly not. Thankfully, a bit of Apple script got things working for me. This post describes how.
The main problem is the lack of a common format between Entourage (.mbox for folders, .eml for individual emails) and Outlook (.pst for everything). There used to be a really good Applescript export tool for exporting from Entourage, but sadly it’s never been updated to work on Leopard. You can export a whole folder as an MBOX file from Entourage, but these can’t be opened by Outlook and so aren’t much use either.
My eventual solution has two parts – getting mail out of Entourage, and then getting it in to Outlook.
Getting mail out of Entourage
For this part, I find an Apple script (based heavily on some code from macosxhints.com) to export all currently-selected emails in Entourage to a folder on my Mac. Many thanks to macosx hints user Golgi body for posting the original code.
The main problem is the lack of a common format between Entourage (.mbox for folders, .eml for individual emails) and Outlook (.pst for everything). There used to be a really good Applescript export tool for exporting from Entourage, but sadly it’s never been updated to work on Leopard. You can export a whole folder as an MBOX file from Entourage, but these can’t be opened by Outlook and so aren’t much use either.
My eventual solution has two parts – getting mail out of Entourage, and then getting it in to Outlook.