Issues exporting WLM to Outlook.

thecomputerguy

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I will be replacing some workstations at a clients office along with moving his email from pop over to O365. Up to this point he has been using WLM for all of his email on 2 Windows 7 computers. About a year ago I tried to get him out of WLM and move him into Outlook but the export from WLM into his Outlook 2007 didn't go well.

The WLM export would crash midway through and the PST would be incomplete. It exported his folders into some obscure format replacing some of the folder title with some folder code created by WLM which makes the whole folder difficult to understand. I gave up on the project and just told him to continue using WLM and well deal with it when I replace the computers.

Well that time is now, and I was hoping it was just Outlook 2007 causing the issues so I installed Outlook 2016 and retried the export and literally the same thing happened. The export failed and just crashed halfway through, and the crazy folder format is still crazy.

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I need to get these out of WLM since I can't install WLM on the new computer (Win10) even if I were only to use it for archive purposes and start fresh with O365 + Outlook 2016.

Any ideas?
 
For the crashes, I suspect that there's something corrupt within the WLM datastore that's only being touched during this.

For the other, if it's important enough you might set up and connect to a local IMAP data store, copy folders from WLM over to IMAP one at a time (because it's going to crash on one of them), then reverse the process into Outlook.
 
If you can get the WLM data imported into Thunderbird, just add the Office 365 account in Thunderbird as a IMAP account. Then copy over all the folders and emails, that will get them to the server. Once they're on the server you can open the account in Outlook using exchange.
 
There is a version of Thunderbird that can directly import mail from WLM or Outlook.
It's not the mainstream one.
I have it here if you want it as I cannot remember where I found it.
 
Stellar has a mbox to pst converter. I think @callthatgirl has used it before. The problem with washing WLM, or anything for that matter, through an IMAP is I'd not trust doing huge moves, especially since it's having problems.
 
The only reliable way to ensure WLM gets into Outlook w/o the crash is to first go through and look for damaged envelopes.

Alternatively, setup a xfer Gmail account and add it to WLM... then drag and drop large chunks of emails onto the account. The transfer will fail on the damaged files so you will have to monitor and prune as needed. Once complete, you can then setup that Gmail account on their new Outlook, sync, then transfer to a new PST.

I have about 80k more emails to transfer tonight. Joy.
 
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