Exporting emails from Entourage to Outlook

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.

Why Compact PST (Outlook Data) Files?

You're probably wondering, "What does it mean to compact Outlook data files (usually called Outlook PST files), and why should I do it?"

Your Outlook data is stored on your computer in one or more personal folders files, usually called .pst files.The .pst refers to the file extension assigned to these kinds of files. Anyway, every

Outlook data item (email message, task, contact, etc.) occupies space in a .pst file. So far so good.

So what happens to the .pst file when you delete an Outlook item? The item goes to Outlook's Deleted Items folder. Since the item can be recovered from there, it makes sense that the item still takes up some space in the .pst file.

Now what happens when you empty the Deleted Items folder? From our point of view, the item is completely gone. It can't be recovered using any normal means. And the item is deleted from the .pst file too. But the space it occupied is still unavailable for other uses.