Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

money69 · Mar 14, 2009, 12:54 PM

I have a really good friend of mine who Im trying to help. He's finally making the switch from Windows to Mac and I want to make sure I can get all his stuff moved over. Im not worried about the pics or music because thats pretty simple. What I need to know is the following,

1. Does Entourage backup automatically under Time Machine?

2. If not, whats the easiest way to move all the contacts and existing email he has in Outlook over to Mail?

3. If Entourage DOES backup under Time Machine, how can I move everything over from outlook to Entourage?

Any caveats?

besson3c · Mar 14, 2009, 01:43 PM

There is no migration path for mail if his account is an IMAP account (or an Exchange account, in the case of Outlook/Entourage), the mail will be available within any client that supports IMAP, the only concern is personal contacts. I'm sure there are converters, and if your friend relies on an Exchange GAL (global address list), this is just an LDAP directory which can be accessed in any other client.

I think the first step is indicating to us whether this account is an Exchange, IMAP, or POP account?

money69 · Mar 14, 2009, 02:59 PM

Originally Posted by besson3c

There is no migration path for mail if his account is an IMAP account (or an Exchange account, in the case of Outlook/Entourage), the mail will be available within any client that supports IMAP, the only concern is personal contacts. I'm sure there are converters, and if your friend relies on an Exchange GAL (global address list), this is just an LDAP directory which can be accessed in any other client.

I think the first step is indicating to us whether this account is an Exchange, IMAP, or POP account?

Sorry, I should have mentioned this before. He is using POP3.

Cold Warrior · Mar 14, 2009, 04:22 PM

He needs to sign up for Gmail, set it up for IMAP, then use Outlook's Move or Copy option to move local messages to their corresponding Gmail IMAP folders. Now they will be available to both Outlook and Entourage at any time.

Entourage will get backed up under Time Machine. Specifically, Entourage's database (which holds all your email and other things) will be backed up. It resides in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data and TM backs up items in there.

To save your contacts from Outlook to Entourage: open your contacts panel in Outlook. Select All then Paste (into a new folder or whatever folder you want just to keep the output organized). This creates contact vCards. vCards are generally cross-platform. Move this folder to your Mac, open Entourage's contacts window, and drag-drop the vCards into the window. They will import.

You can also drag-drop them into OS X's Address Book application and it should work.

besson3c · Mar 14, 2009, 04:46 PM

Just to be clear, Entourage's database doesn't contain the original emails with an IMAP account, it just stores an offline copy or cache of the same email messages which can quite easily be recreated.

Otherwise, I agree with Cold Warrior. In my opinion there is no reason for anybody to still be using POP. POP accounts are inconvenient and inferior in just about every imaginable way.

money69 · Mar 14, 2009, 08:13 PM

Originally Posted by Cold Warrior

He needs to sign up for Gmail, set it up for IMAP, then use Outlook's Move or Copy option to move local messages to their corresponding Gmail IMAP folders. Now they will be available to both Outlook and Entourage at any time.

Entourage will get backed up under Time Machine. Specifically, Entourage's database (which holds all your email and other things) will be backed up. It resides in ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data and TM backs up items in there.

To save your contacts from Outlook to Entourage: open your contacts panel in Outlook. Select All then Paste (into a new folder or whatever folder you want just to keep the output organized). This creates contact vCards. vCards are generally cross-platform. Move this folder to your Mac, open Entourage's contacts window, and drag-drop the vCards into the window. They will import.

You can also drag-drop them into OS X's Address Book application and it should work.

I appreciate all the help. I have one last question relating to IMAP and Gmail for example. On my computer and another one I have I have it setup via imap with the IDLE setup as well and I get connection errors with Gmail, is this an issue on their end or something from the client? Any fixes for this? Anyone know what the problem is?

On a side note, my friend is using his comcast account, I thought about moving him to gmail but he would have to change his address. Im thinking its still worth it and I can probably setup something within gmail to have all his email automatically sent from his comcast account? Any suggestions?

I appreciate all the help,

Thanks.

Sarc · Mar 16, 2009, 10:03 PM

I've migrated several Outlook accounts to either Mail.app or Entourage, and it's a painful process. You need to import from Outlook into Thunderbird, then transfer the MBOX files (the large files int he profile folder, with no extension) that contain the data into the Mac, add the .mbox extension and then import them into Outlook/Mail.app.

You can Google for tutorials on how to do this.

(Also, Mail.app wll require you run a small script that will change the 'filetype' atribute of the MBOX files into 'text' before being able to import them, available at entourage.mvps.org).

Hope it helps !

Cold Warrior · Mar 16, 2009, 10:11 PM

But gmail negates the entire import process. Move messages from Outlook to a second account (this one Gmail IMAP) within Outlook. They will be copied/stored on the Gmail server for simple availability from any client. If you don't want to use gmail after that, it's ok -- just copy the messages to local folders.

No Tbird MBOX import or drag-rename necessary.

besson3c · Mar 16, 2009, 10:33 PM

Cold Warrior is right. Not to sound like a jerk, but I don't understand why people dick around with POP at all, but especially importing mail this way. IMAP is not great at this in terms of its performance in import/transferring messages in bulk, but it is the only standard that is common ground between just about every email client.

Andrew Stephens · Mar 17, 2009, 01:17 PM

Entourages database is still a problem under time machine since it shows up as one big file. Incremental backups will copy this file repeatedly resulting in large backups and potential filling up of time machine drive space.

Any mail application that stores mail as individual files is going to better under time machine than Entourage.

I know people backing up 16 or more GB of entourage data every day with time machine!