Considering a move from Outlook 2007 to eM Client on a new PC

Initial setup
1

My currrent Windows Vista computer with MS Office 2007 is creaking and I am modernizing my equipment with Windows 10 on a new PC. However, having gone through the pain of setting up Microsoft Office 2019 for somebody else, I am certain that I do not want any of that for myself. Hence I am looking for a completely non-MS Office office. This includes the email client, and eM Client looks like a serious contender.

I’ve browsed through the forum here, and I haven’t found a discussion that deals with my exact concern. I have a slighlty complicated email arrangement in Outlook 2007: two different email addresses get their mail there, and also there is an archive file for old (5-year+) emails encompassing both accounts. Therefore, I have two .PST files, the regular outlook.pst and then archive.pst.

A further complication is, of course, that these .PST files are on a different computer altogether, and therefore I can’t simply use the account import feature in eM Client. I do know that I can import the .PST file… but then, I have two of these files.

So here is my question: If I import the outlook.pst file into eM Client, and then also import the archive.pst file, how will those older emails get integrated into the folder structure? Currently, they sit in their own Outlook “Archive” folder.

One observation: as a test, I installed a trial version of eM Client into a third PC (that had no email client) and imported the archive.pst file into it. In Outlook, this file has four sub-folders under it, but none of those sub-folders appear to have made it over into eM Client. Of the emails in those sub-folders, only a few seem to be showing up in the main Inbox folder and the rest are nowhere to be seen. Is this normal/expected?

I should specify that these are POP3 accounts and not IMAP, so there isn’t anything to download from a remote server.

Thanks very much for any ideas, tips, or warnings.

2

I don’t know if this would apply, but is it possible the archive folders imported in your test were put under a local folder and you need to expand the folder in the list to find them?

Is the pst file from the 2007 version of outlook? Not sure if the file format changed much in 14 years, but if you import that archive into a modern outlook do all the folders show up? If they do, perhaps you could create a new archive.pst (or some other name) in the newer outlook and try importing that into eMC to see if it picks up the folders (assuming they didn’t already get imported).

3

Thanks for the ideas. You’re right, all I needed to do was to expand the listings to show the full folder structure.

Having tried that, in order to get a fresh start I uninstalled eM Client and deleted all folders on the new PC that had anything to do with the program, then I reinstalled it. I exported the PST file on the old PC properly via Outlook and then tried importing it into eM Client on the new PC.

That PST file is very large, so I was curious whether it would carry over intact. During the Import there was an error message that said, “Error when preparing import: Index was out of range. Must be non-negative and less than the size of the collection. Parameter name: startIndex.” (???)

When the import process ended, I inspected the contents. The Contacts and Tasks did not make it over, and there is a gap in the email Inbox between March 24 and May 11. Half of last November’s emails are missing, as are all of the December emails. Not sure what else might be missing, but this is not reassuring.

4

We never did resolve the PST file import issue and I had to resort to buying Outlook 2019.

However, I have an additional email account that was getting serviced by the ancient Windows Mail application. For that one, I did manage to transfer the EML files and contacts into eM Client on the new computer almost flawlessly.