Moving email from Windows live mail to outlook

Question

I am helping someone move data from their old laptop to a new one. The old laptop is windows 10 and running windows essentials 2012 live mail. The new PC is windows 10 and has outlook 2019 on it.

2 of the accounts are imap and can be moved with ease. there is a 3rd account setup in live mail that does not sync with a server and only serves to store about 8000+ messages dating from 2009 to 2015. The messages are on the hard drive of the old laptop in .eml format.

I created a .pst file in outlook to house the older mail. What I need to know is how to import it. I tried dragging and dropping it from the hard drive into the outlook folder and it imported, but was not treated as a mail message showing info like from, to, date, message. Outlook treated it as a file with todays date.

How might I go about getting the files into outlook? is there maybe someway to export the mail into a.pst file? I'm not that familiar with windows live mail since it's not been maintained in years.

Answer 1

Hi @RCDA Webmaster ,

Please first understand here we mainly focus on general issues about Outlook desktop client and know little about Windows live Mail. As I know, there may be no option in Outlook that could import the .eml file directly except dragging it to the folder.

However, based on my research, I found a relevant article that mentioned we could install the Outlook in original PC and import your message from windows live mail to Outlook directly, then we could export a .pst file in Outlook and restore it in your new PC. For more detailed information, please refer to the Scenario 2: Outlook is located on another computer and Migrate Mail part of the article mentioned above.(Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.)

Hope that would be helpful to you.

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Answer 2

I tried to export from Windows live mail to outlook and it keeps hanging on message 21 of 7007. The first 20 went into outlook without failure. I can see the folder with email in the windows explorer. How do I know which item is #21. I thought about removing a few messages at a time till i get rid of the offending item, but that would take forever since it could be any of the 7000+ messages.

Any suggestions?

I could always remove all the messages and start dumping them back in till i find a batch that causes error exporting and narrow things down from there.