Senior Computer Tutor
Don Edrington
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Copying Outlook Express Messages to
Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail
or Windows Live Hotmail
Outlook Express was an email program that came with all versions of Windows, up to and including Windows XP.
Windows Vista came with Windows Mail (not to be confused with Windoows Live Mail).
Windows 7 has no email program. Users are asked to download
Windows Live Hotmail from
Microsoft.com.
(For a while we were being asked to download Windows Live Mail, which Microsoft now appears to be morphing into Windows Live Hotmail.)
Why did Microsoft stop including an email program with Windows?
Well, they were accused of unfair competition by other email services, who said people are unlikely to sign up for their email programs when they automatically get one bundled with Windows. Thus Microsoft
abandonded Outlook Express and Windows Mail with the release of Windows 7.
Another change made by Microsoft was abandoning the use of DBX files, which worked well when copying message folders from a WinXP computer to another WinXP machine. More about DBX can be seen here: Moving DBX Files to a New PC.
In any case, if you copy any Outlook Express .eml Messages to a Windows Vista or Win7 computer they will be recognized by Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail or Hotmail. Here’s how to make this happen:
Each message created or received in Outlook Express (or Windows Live Hotmail) has a file name based on what’s in the Subject Line plus the extension: .eml. Thus, a message with, say,
Good Morning in the Subject Line it would have a file name of Good Morning.eml.
However, an Outlook Express message’s file name is normally unseen unless you drag the file onto your Desktop (or anywhere else outside of Outlook Express). This is important to understand if you want to copy Outlook Express messages onto a Windows 7 computer, where they will be recognized by Windows Live Hotmail or Windows Live Mail.
Here’s how to get the messages from the older computer onto the new one:
Using the computer that has Outlook Express on it, create a new folder by right-clicking the Desktop and choosing New>Folder. Name the folder Inbox and drag it to one edge of your screen so that it can be seen when you launch Outlook Express, which is the next step.
From your open Inbox drag the messages you want copied into the folder you just created. If you want to do this with all the Inbox messages, click on the top one, press Shift, and then click on the bottom message. This will select all of them, whereupon they can be dragged en masse.If you just want to select certain messages, hold down Ctrl while you click your choices.
Repeat the above steps with each of your Outlook Express folders. Then you can drag these folders onto a USB removable drive (thumb drive or stick drive) after which the drive can be inserted into a USB port on the new computer, from whence they can be dragged onto the new PC's Desktop.
Double-click on any .eml file and it will open in the Windows Live email program you have on the Windows 7 machine.
Also, bear in mind that the folders and the messages they contain have been copied, not physically moved.
© Donald Ray Edrington - All Rights Reserved
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