Outlook Express 2003 (XP) to Outlook 2003 (W8)? - Help!

Hi All

I am beginning to think this is impossible but........I have spent the last 10 days or so getting really fed up with W8. My lovely old XP is dying so I thought I would upgrade (big mistake). However I have managed to get around all the problems it has thrown at me. I was just tidying up the homescreen when I espied an Outlook icon. I installed Office 2003 on the W8 PC (I really only need Excel, Word and Powerpoint and that version is good enough). The only problem I have now with W8 is that it will not work with a POP email account (I know, I know) but there is a work around that I managed to do using a GMail account, and that is okay I guess.

However as Excel etc seem to work fine, I wondered whether I could run Outlook on the new PC even though it is running W8? I got quite far, I set up the account okay but when I tried to import my old emails it told me it could not open the folder. I am wondering if this is because it searches for a file location that does not exist (at least that is what I found in the guts of Outlook) but equally I could have made a schoolboy error and it will work it is just I am doing something wrong.

Would be grateful for any help, but don't point me to the MS solution because I have tried that and it does not work. Perhaps it is not compatible but it seems odd that Excel and Word etc work okay.

Thanks

Rob S

Hi there
try this - it DOES work so I'm not sure why you are having problems - but follow the instructions EXACTLY.

Outlook Express to Outlook 2007/Windows 7 - Microsoft Community

If you have any problems post again - I've got OE on a Windows 2003 server Virtual machine with Office installed so I'll have a test with 2 or 3 emails to check the procedure.

(You can backup your Outlook 2003/2010/2007) files with pfbkup.exe outlook backup program from the ms site so save your existing outlook files , delete etc and then do exactly what the ms post says --you can then re-import your original outlook files again by opening the backup file created).

Cheers
jimbo

Hi

Thanks for the reply. That link is not quite what I need. I have Outlook Express 6 on an XP machine that I want to import to Outlook 2003 on a W8 machine, not Office 2007.

The address for my storebox is quite odd as it has most of what is written in that link except in the middle it has a huge length of alphanumerics also I cannot see where the extension is .pst. If I go to the location as described there are four files there but none are .pst files.

At the moment on the machine I want to import to, I have the files which are .dbx, and I need to import them into Outlook Office 2003. When I try to do this it says cannot open files. Is that because it always searches for the default file (and I need to put them in there?).

I am convinced it will work but the links didn't relate to this, or at least I couldn't work it out - sorry to be such an IT numpty!

Rob

I am trying another tack, I have just installed Outlook 2003 on my XP so at least now I am transferring like to like, not sure if that will make any difference! Will report back

I am a genius! Here is how I did it. Set up Outlook on XP PC. Saved .pst data. When trying to import it goes to default 'Outbox' file, so renamed this 'Outbox 123' then renamed 'backup' to 'Outbox' and bingo!!! Just need to import sent items but not sure how I can do that now - still I can live without that!

I can't see how I can get my sent mail into Outlook though. I tried to temporarily change the name of the file while I added the 'Sent Items' in but it didn't like that. And to copy the files it does not seem possible to highlight everything from Inbox to Sent Items. Well I almost did it but not quite - but probably good enough.

Does this help?
Import your messages or account from Outlook Express to Outlook - Outlook - Office.com

Or is it what you've already done?

Kind of what I have already done, although I made it up as I went along. What I was unable to do was copy ALL of the email content in one go - that would have been the ideal situation. However I could only copy one folder so chose Inbox and the subfiles and that worked. I expect there is a way to copy all, (I did try) but I can probably work round that. Thanks for the info though