Computer Help Please!! (Email Help)

[matonanjin]

It's a NCD!! Yes, a New Computer Day! Which is the great news. I finally am going to have a computer powerful enough to edit videos and do everything else. Fast processor, 16 Gig of memory, acres (2 - 2TB) of HD drives storage, etc.

And I spent all yesterday and this morning transferring stuff. But I have run into a problem figuring out how to transfer emails.

It's a Windows system, BTW, and using Outlook for email. But how do I transfer all my stored emails? I know everything is stored in PST or OST files. And I have 2 email accounts. So I have transferred the two OST files to the new computer. Now what do I do with them?

Do I start Outlook and tell it somehow to use these files? Or do I set up accounts in Outlook and then input the data from those files. I have Googled (actually DuckDuckGo'd) but can't seem to find a clear set of instructions.

Thank you

 

[alantig]

https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/...e-computer-to-another-using-microsoft-outlook

This page has what looks to be a pretty nice description of the process (disclaimer - I only skimmed it quickly). I found a Microsoft support page as well, but it didn't seem to be as clear.

It seems like it boils down to a couple steps:

- Export to a PST file on the old computer.
- Import the PST file on the new computer.

This is something that's always given me fits on Windows computers. It seems like it's never quite as straightforward as it should be. I used Thunderbird as a mail client, and it seemed like I fought that process when I moved computers, moreso on my mother-in-law's computer than mine.

ETA: There's an Import/Export Wizard under File/Open & Export, according to the Dell page. I wanted to include that before, but I forgot the details.

 

[dmatthews]

Who/what is your email provider? Outlook.com/gmail etc may have all your emails online which you could just sync with again.

 

[HANGAR18]

Assuming you are using a local installation of the Outlook email client on your old PC, create a PST file(s) as needed on the old computer and put them in a folder where you can find them easily. Keep the size of your PST files to a minimum. One way to do this is to make a new PST file for each year and put the whole year's worth of emails in that PST file. (Yes you can create individual folders inside each PST file as needed according to your own method of organization.) PST files that get too big can corrupt and it is a PITA to run the PST file repair tool.

I wouldn't move the OST files because I don't see any advantages to doing so, but that IS where the memory of who you sent emails to previously exists if you are too lazy to retype everyone's email address again from scratch. Try not to rely on Outlook remembering people's email addresses and auto populate the TO field.

Copy the PST files to the new computer af then join them to the new Outlook email client running on the new machine. FILE> ACCOUNT SETTINGS> Account Settings> DATA FILES> Add... navigate to the new PST files... touch one at a time and save the setting. Note; You don't have to keep all 9 years worth of PST files joined to Outlook at the same time. If you need something from 2018 or example., you can attach it to Outlook, go in and get what you are looking for and then disconnect it when you are done in order to keep a clean workspace.

 

[HANGAR18]

Assuming you are using a local installation of the Outlook email client on your old PC, create a PST file(s) as needed on the old computer and put them in a folder where you can find them easily. Keep the size of your PST files to a minimum. One way to do this is to make a new PST file for each year and put the whole year's worth of emails in that PST file. (Yes you can create individual folders inside each PST file as needed according to your own method of organization.) PST files that get too big can corrupt and it is a PITA to run the PST file repair tool.

I wouldn't move the OST files because I don't see any advantages to doing so, but that IS where the memory of who you sent emails to previously exists if you are too lazy to retype everyone's email address again from scratch. Try not to rely on Outlook remembering people's email addresses and auto populate the TO field.

Copy the PST files to the new computer af then join them to the new Outlook email client running on the new machine. FILE> ACCOUNT SETTINGS> Account Settings> DATA FILES> Add... navigate to the new PST files... touch one at a time and save the setting. Note; You don't have to keep all 9 years worth of PST files joined to Outlook at the same time. If you need something from 2018 or example., you can attach it to Outlook, go in and get what you are looking for and then disconnect it when you are done in order to keep a clean workspace.

Next time I'll need you to open a ticket and make an appointment. hahahaha

 

[Astora]

Hi, congratulations on your purchase. You can try to transfer everything from your email by manual transfer. The main idea of this option is to create a new account and connect it to the old one via IMAP. Btw, my hard drive broke down two months ago. Therefore I had to resort to raid data recovery. After this incident, I store important documents either on a USB stick or on the cloud drive. You can also try to download messages from Gmail as a zip archive. It should contain several MBOX files and finally import them into Outlook. I hope you will be able to find a way out.

 

[HANGAR18]

Hi, congratulations on your purchase. You can try to transfer everything from your email by manual transfer. The main idea of this option is to create a new account and connect it to the old one via IMAP.

Well yeah... assuming then that all of his email is still on the server, then sure... there is nothing to transfer. Just install your email client on the new machine and connect it to the mailbox on the server. Done.

I do that all the time whenever I build a new machine. But my mailbox on the server doesn't have email going back that far. All of my REALLY OLD email (going back 20 years) is all saved in .pst files.

I don't think he mentioned what kind of mailbox he had or who his email provider was. We'd need to know that in order to provide a more accurate answer.