Outlook Express supports it, but not all of the alternatives do. Then move the mail to it’s final destination on your new or upgraded machine.Īll of these approaches have downsides. The ability to use multiple identities is usually the big one.
In that virtual machine, install one of the other email programs we’ve been talking about and use that other program to import the email store, converting to the new program’s format. Once again, I strongly recommend that the first thing you do is move away from Outlook Express. Once you’ve done so, you can presumably fire up Outlook Express and access that mail. You would then need to transfer the data store from wherever it is to the virtual machine that you’ve just created.
You can do the same on other operating systems by installing virtual machine software, like Oracle’s Virtual Box, and setting up a Windows XP virtual machine of your own.
XP mode is ultimately Windows XP running in a virtual machine on Windows 7 (or better). In Windows 7 Pro, and better, you can install what’s called XP mode. It’s more complex, and I mention it only as a last resort. The good news is that most of the other email programs we’re talking about actually make it relatively easy to then move the email from one machine to another. Typically, all that really means is importing into some other email program. The key to both of these scenarios is to get your email out of Outlook Express’s proprietary, and unfortunately fairly fragile database format. But it can work, and in many cases it does.Īnd then once you’ve done that, you’ve got your email in this other email program. Some of the import utilities actually rely on that, and thus they won’t work in this moved situation – where you’re actually trying to do the import on something other than Windows XP. The issue is that once the data store has been moved to a machine that does not actually run Outlook Express, a little bit of information about where the data store is located or how it’s formatted is lost. It’s essentially the same thing we did by installing an email program on your Windows XP machine. This doesn’t work with all mail programs, but it does work with several. Now use that program’s import feature to import your Outlook Express mail. Configure that email and that program, as appropriate, to access your current email. Now, like in the first approach, install another email program: Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail, Outlook from Microsoft Office, or something similar. But one relatively quick way to find it is to simply search the hard disk for folders.dbx, which is a file in a root of the Outlook data store. You’ll find it on the old XP machine backup or hard drive, typically buried under a folder in your user account. Either way, the data store that Outlook Express uses has been copied or saved somehow, and is now accessible on your new machine.
In other words, you’ve recovered it from a backup or you’ve copied it to your new machine before you decommissioned the Windows XP machine.
On a machine that cannot run Outlook Express, like your Windows 8.1 machine, you have to make sure that the entire original Outlook Express data store is available. The second approach is if it’s already too late… in other words, if you no longer have Windows XP, but you do have a copy of the original mail store.
With Thunderbird, for example, you can then move that data to Windows Vista, 7 or 8 even to a Mac or Linux machine. Once you’ve done that, you’ll have something that’s very easy to move to another machine and even to another operating system. Chose an email program that will allow you to import all of your Outlook Express email. I recommend something like Thunderbird, but I believe Microsoft Office’s Outlook will do, and Windows Live Mail might do as well. It’s absolutely the easiest solution that I know of.Īnd that’s this: on the XP machine that’s running Outlook Express, install another email program. My preferred approach doesn’t work for everyone, but I think it will work for you since you have your existing Windows XP machine. It’s very difficult to complete a data transfer successfully. It’s easy to have it not work at all, to lose mail, or experience all sorts of other associated issues that make it kind of a mess, to put it politely. One of Outlook Express’s many problems is that it makes moving the Outlook data store very difficult. It’s a proprietary format and it’s very, very fragile. It’s time to move on to something that’s less buggy and actually supported.īut that does leave many existing Outlook Express users with a big problem: what do you do with all the email that you have stored in your existing Outlook Express installation?