Hi all ... no problems dual-booting Vista & XP with Vista pre-installed, but now I have a new problem. I need to move all the email & folders from Vista Mail back to good ol' Outlook Express in XP. I got all the "contacts/address book" exported from Vista Mail to OE with no problem. The actual mail stores are another question. In Vista Mail the only 2 options for exporting are ...
1). Microsoft Exchange
2). Microsoft Windows Mail (D-oH!)
Neither option solves my issues.

So I tried the MS Exchange option anyway and get an error message "failure to initialize MAPI". Mind you I knew that neither option would work IMO. I was right. I do know where Windows Vista Mail stores it's dbx files but they don't look compatible with XP's OE. I've never had a problem migrating mail from OE to Vista Mail, but not the other way around. I've searched for help but the only posts I found are moving from OE to Vista Mail!!

Anyone have a quick fix for this or a backup application that may work here. We want to chuck Vista Mail completely, but have a ton of folders and mail archived we want to move to OE. I guess I could email them all to myself, but there's literally hundreds of them - lol! There must be an easier answer and I'll bet one of you out there has some ideas for this ol' geek.

Your input & suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Have you checked out this webpage before?
http://www.oehelp.com/backup.aspx

Nativedude wrote:

Have you checked out this webpage before? http://www.oehelp.com/backup.aspx

Thanks but this doesn't seem to work "backwards" ... from Vista Mail to Outlook Express ... just the other way around. I've never had problems importing OE Mail to Vista Mail. There's lots of tutorials out there on getting it into Vista. Also, the software you mentioned isn't freeware, it's $25 to register. It doesn't appear to do what I need it to do.

I'm going to attempt importing the Vista Mail database into OE and see what happens. I'll post my results back here. In the meantime if anyone knows a proven way to accomplish this I'd love to hear from you. Thanks again.

Have you tried this?

I worked out an easy solution for transferring Vista's Windows Mail to Outlook Express:
1. On the Vista computer, create a New Folder on the Desktop.
2. Open Windows Mail and position the window and New Folder so that you can see both.
3. Select the e-mail messages you want to go to Outlook Express, and drag them to the New Folder.
4. Put the new Folder onto removable media.
5. Attach the removable media to the XP computer.
6. Open Outlook Express and position the window and New Folder so that you can see both.
7. Open the New Folder and Select All.
8. Drag the selected messages into the list of messages for the Inbox or desired folder in Outlook Express (just make sure that the target folder is open).
9. Delete the New Folder from both computers and the removable media.

From this webpage:http://www.vista4beginners.com/node/182

Mark

Hmmmm - that sounds good - I'll try it. I did try copying the Vista Mail store to the XP partiton and importing but of course that didn't work. I also tried exporting the messages using "Windows Mail" & "Exchange" but XP didn't recognize them.

Your solution will probably work. I've got a LOT of messages to move but it does make sense. I'll let you know how it works out. Thanks for the ideas!