# Trouble getting old mailboxes into Entourage



## ouiareborg (Jan 20, 2005)

I'm not used to Microsoft. My friend's computer crashed and after backing up everything, I erased and reinstalled. I reinstalled everything and tried importing mailboxes back into Entourage without success. I've done it with Mac Mail with no problem. I opened up Users/Library/mail and see the Mailboxes there, I just can't seem to import them. Any help is appreciated.


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## MSM Hobbes (Apr 23, 2004)

Hello, and welcome!

What version of macintosh does your friend have?

See if any of these links might help:
http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq_topic/import_export.html

Found this tip too, but lost the link to where it came from, sorry: 
Go to .../Home/Library/Mail/Mailboxes. Control-click one of the mailbox icons and select "Show Package Contents". In the resulting window, locate the 'mbox' file and drag a copy (option-drag) to your desktop. Now drag that into one Entourage's mail folders -- any will do. This will create a new mail folder called 'mbox' that contains your imported mail. Repeat this process for all of the mailboxes in the .../Home/Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder. *Caveat*: Don't try to get clever by renaming the 'mbox' file on your desktop. Entourage won't recognize it. But you can drag a succession of 'mbox' files into Entourage, and Entourage will sequentially number them for you. There is a very nifty shareware program called emailchemy (http://www.weirdkid.com/) that does all of this on multiple mailboxes quickly and easily. Just list up the mailboxes in your .../Home/Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder. But at $25, it is a steep price for something that most people will likely use only once. Of course, the contacts from Apple's Address Book are a bit easier to export, although you must drag each separately to the desktop to create individual vCards -- Entourage doesn't accept any but the first card in a multiple-card file.


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## ouiareborg (Jan 20, 2005)

He had 10.3.3, but he couldn't find the disks and the only thing around to reinstall was 10.2.7. So that's what I installed. I'lltry that though.


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## MSY-Houston (Dec 5, 2004)

ouiareborg said:


> I'm not used to Microsoft. My friend's computer crashed and after backing up everything, I erased and reinstalled. I reinstalled everything and tried importing mailboxes back into Entourage without success. I've done it with Mac Mail with no problem. I opened up Users/Library/mail and see the Mailboxes there, I just can't seem to import them. Any help is appreciated.


When Microsoft Office (or components) are installed in OSX, some files pertaining to individual users (or main account user) are created and stored in a folder called Documents.

If you didn't copy the user Documents folder before you erased the hard disk, the information is gone (not to be confused with the Documents folder from the root directory). Here's the tree:

username/Documents/Microsoft User Data

It is in this Documents folder where you'll find any system/application files pertaining to Preferences, i.e., Eudora, Acrobat, Mozilla, etc., with the following exception.

In the main or root directory, there is a folder called Library. Inside of the main Library is a Preferences folder (Library/Preferences) is the Apple Mail and Safari folders (and another Mozilla--don't ask me, I haven't figured that one out yet!).

I've found you have to be extremely careful with OSX about what you delete and where you delete it from. It is a complex, but stable system. (Have a feeling I'm going to be on a learning curve for a while yet, myself.)

Good luck,

Houston


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## ouiareborg (Jan 20, 2005)

Yeah, I'm going to have to type this out. Thanks everybody. I tried dragging the mbox files after what was suggested and instead of finding the 30-35 emails he had in there, all I found was 5. I'll try looking in the other places.


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