Moving Apple Mail to Outlook

Converting Apple Mail emails to import into Outlook for Mac 

Why, oh why ,would you want to move from Apple’s Mail.app to Microsoft Outlook on the Mac? Maybe your company policy states you must. Maybe you bought Microsoft Office for the Mac 2011 and want to use Outlook now. Whatever the case, getting email out of Mail.app to Outlook used to be easy, but Apple has made some changes to how the email files are stored.

You would think the easiest solution would be in Outlook to go File–>Import and that would give you the option to Import Mail.app email files. Nope, not there. Click “Contacts and messages from a text file” and you’d be getting warmer. “Import messages from an MBOX-format text file” is what we are looking for.

After clicking that, the next step used to be to go to your “Library” folder, then “Mail” and you could import the MBOX files located within the folders. Now that Apple changed the MBOX format they use, there are now 3 additional steps:

Step 1: Copy the “V2” (or V6 for newer OSs) folder to your Desktop. To get to the folder you can click the “Go” menu from the finder and select “Go to Folder” and enter the following: ~/Library/Mail/

You’ll see the “V2” (or V6) folder. Drag and drop it to your Desktop while holding the Option key. This will make a copy of the folder to your Desktop. Make sure you make a copy! If anything goes wrong your original email will still be accessible then.

Step 2: Open the copy of your “V2” (or V6) folder on your Desktop, then in the Spotlight search field to the top right of the window type”.emlx”. Make sure to only search the “V2” (or V6) folder by clicking the “V2” (or V6) button next to Search. This will list all of your emails that are in Mail.app. Back on the Desktop create another new folder called “MessageCopy” and select all of the items in the window, then drag them to the new folder “MessageCopy”. This will move all of the messages from separate folders into 1 folder. 

Step 3: Rename the files. Here you have a couple of options. CNet has great articles here about using Automator to rename files. Another option to rename the files is to select all the files, then right click the group of files and choose “Rename X Files” (x is the number). This will use the Finder to change the file name endings. What you’re going to do is rename the files in “MessageCopy” from ending in “.emlx” to “.eml”. You’ll then be able to drag and drop those messages into Outlook. You will have to do some tidying up as the folder structure from Mail is not transferred over to Outlook. 

If you’re using IMAP as your server type none of this will be necessary unless you want to move messages off of the server to a folder called “On my Mac” in Mail.