How to Export Mail from Macintosh Entourage 2004 into Windows based PC.

I've been working on a way to export mail from Macintosh Entourage 2004 into Windows XP based PC. I have come to the point I don't even care what format, just as long as all the email makes it out and brings the attachments with it. It would be ideal to be able to export from Entourage to Outlook, but I haven't been able to bridge that gap yet. So the instructions below are to export from Entourage and import into Mozilla's Thunderbird email client.

So far the most promising way seems to be exporting following the steps below:

1. Export an .rge archive folder structure of the local mailbox in Entourage 2004 on the Mac, using the Entourage Archive tool.
2. Then copy that folder and all subfolders to a PC
3. Install Mozilla's Thunderbird email client onto the Windows XP PC you will use to access the exported email. You can download Thunderbird for free here http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
   
4. Using Window XP's search feature, search the .rge archive folder you copied from the Mac for ".mbox" files.
   
5. Copy ALL the .mbox files into Thunderbird's default mailbox folder. On the XP Professional system I was using, it was found at:
   C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\u8qn8rvf.default\Mail\Local Folders
6. After you dump all the .mbox folders in there, launch Thunderbird and it should be able to view almost all the folders you copied over. Why almost? If you used special characters, which Mac OSX allows but is pretty much forbidden in the Windows world. (Some characters like /, \, <, >, ?, etc. are allowed in Macintosh filenames but are illegal for most Windows applications.) Those mailbox folders will not work in Thunderbird. The mailbox folder name shows up slightly modified but will appear empty. All you need to do is rename the actual .mbox file with all valid characters and relaunch Thunderbird and the mail will show up properly. If you only have a couple a folders, that is fine.... but my little project here has a whole gang load, so I'm looking into a more automatic method.
7. I corrected the special character issues with the program "Bulk Rename Utility" which can be downloaded for FREE at http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Main_Intro.php (they do ask for donations)
   
   
   
   
8. Search for "._" using XP's search tool and delete all these hidden files, we won't use them in Windows and this is a COPY of the original files we are working with anyway right? You did make a copy right? I had some issues deleting some, but left them there as I didn't care.
9. Careful with folder paths or filenames being too long, since numerous subdirectories can exists. I chopped down certain file folders that had names that were too long.

I was actually just going to breakdown and BUY the software Emailchemy and have it do this export for me, http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/, but playing around with the demo version I noticed for 1 subfolder it misses all the attachments. Not sure if that would occur for other folders, I decided NOT to use this application since it did not do EVERYTHING in my case. I used the IMAP server feature of Emailchemy for those interested on how I tried to export the mail.

I know you can copy a mail message directly from Entourage into Outlook (as a single email message file), but again my project had over 30-40 folders with thousands of emails. Around 14,000 emails I think, I'm not going to copy that and rebuild that structure. And this was only for one user, I have a handful of users to do this for. Hope this blog was some help to someone out there and if you have a method to complete that last import step into MS Outlook, please let me know!