earlier i made a list of all the programs i was looking into for the mac to help me settle in after having a pc for years. i just paid the $10 to register outlook2mac. damn, it's worth it. it's really good at moving email from outlook to the mac program mail. it took me some additional steps to get it from outlook to entourage--god knows why it takes work to get from microsoft to microsoft but that's microsoft for you!

mail had no problem reading the mbox files. it took them as is. entourage on the other hand was looking for text files so i renamed the files from .mbox to .txt, only that was good enough for entourage! i opened up texteditor and made sure i was saving the files as plain text. no go. i tried again using dreamweaver to save the files as .css, success! then i started saving them as .txt with dreamweaver and that worked too. i only had the clue to use dreamweaver because in the list of possible files to import, one of my .css files was highlightable in entourage but all the .mbox and .txt files were not! once i saved the text files in dreamweaver though, they became accessible in entourage.

dreamweaver though had a bit of a problem saving my files because i have saved a lot of email over the years. most of my mailboxes had hundreds of messages. i remember one mailbox had over 680 messages. then there's also attachments. i think my biggest mailbox file was close to 8 megs. dreamweaver choked several times on that one! twiddle thumbs is much more efficient at cleaning up her email on her pc. that was done in two seconds flat. i thought i would purge after i made the move. once again, virtual life is just like real life! it's better to clean up BEFORE you move!