One year later, March 2013, I’ve proved successful import and viewing of old mail from Outlook Express on an old computer! Other bloggers indicated seeing message “There are no messages to show in this view”. By dint of experimentation, here is how I got lucky. Transferred old mail parent/sub folders onto an external hard drive. On new windows 7 pc within eM client menu, File, chose to import from Outlook Express. The instructions re folder locations are reasonably clear and possibly wrongly, I chose to create a new sub-folder “Old dell email” under my email address folder. Effected the transfer from external drive but got the no messages message above. (Clicking on Properties intimated the stuff got transferred somewhere). MOVED said folder underneath LOCAL heading, again nothing, but I then saw all my old mail folders under a sub-folder “Keep”. If I put that folder name there I got lucky because that’s where I can retrieve everything. Sorted - and perhaps my experience will help others doing similar exercise. PS Re “accounts” eM Client support staff have indicated elsewhere that they are limiting the number of accounts for the free version.
Good to know you’re still hard at it, Graham! Outstanding!
In reading your solution, my eyes started crossing reading the things you tried that didn’t work, and I’m not entirely clear on how you eventually worked it out.
Would you mind giving a step by step of your process? (excluding what did not work)
-
Transferred old mail parent/sub folders onto an external hard drive.
-
On new windows 7 pc within eM client menu, File, choose to import from Outlook Express.
Thanks!
Kind Regards,
JS
Hi JS - sorry about this slight delay - the one year delay caused by my own misgivings about upgrading to Windows 7!
Re point 1. I had kept a record of folders where email is/was stored on my old pc (I’d named parent Mail_Joint). For many people, this could best be discovered by doing a search in the start menu area for files named *.dbx (ie all files with the suffix dbx and they may be buried deep in outlook express) Goto the associated parent folder and click to highlight it and all your associated sub-folders eg draft, archives, sent, travel etc. Now, with external hard drive connected, create a new folder on the external drive and call it OldMail. Copy your old OE mail folders into it so OldMail is the parent. That’s fairly easy!
Re point 2. Again, it’s not too scary and remember you will be able to Cancel if you wish! I can’t remember the exact sequence of questions but you are asked where to import from - perhaps being asked to ‘browse’: so find the external hard drive and the parent folder OldMail you pulled in as in point 1. You are then asked where you want to import to on your new/eM Client pc . This is the point where I felt eM Client was a bit vague where to dump everything . . Smart folders, or myemailaddress@talktalk or Local folders? Firstly I tried myemailaddress@talktalk but it did not seem to confirm the import/transfer (keep reading below - perhaps I was expecting too much too soon). So then I dumped the parent folder OldMail into Local folders and after waiting a while for everything to arrive on the new hard drive, I discovered in fact that the old main ‘default’ folder contents ie where OE folder names mirror eM Client folder names eg ‘Inbox’ and ‘Sent’, got merged in/aggregated with recent eM Client stuff in similar myemailaddress@talktalk folders whereas all my other OldMail sub folders got dumped by eM Client into LOCAL folder!! I can live with that! One noteworthy final rider . . assuming you are successful, you’ll find that all the attachments to your old emails also get imported into eM Client. That was a surprise to me! Good luck!
Thank you! I will try your excellent solution as soon as I have some free time.
I appreciate the research time you have invested in finding a workaround to this situation! Maybe eM Client staff will take notice and add it to their FAQ!
Kind Regards,
JS
Thank you - we will certainly add it to our knowledgebase.