"On My Mac" Email Folders - Outlook for Mac

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"On My Mac" Email Folders - Outlook for Mac

Have used Outlook for Mac (MS Office 365) for many years. That program allows a nice hierarchy of "On My Mac" email folders and subfolders for storage and access of emails. I have hundreds of these.

The "New" Outlook for Mac released a year or so ago does NOT support "On My Mac" folders so I have to consider converting to Apple/Mac Mail instead of the "New" Outlook moving forward.

Questions: 1. Does Apple/Mac Email support "On My Mac" folders and subfolders for email storage and organizing? 2. Is there going to be a problem with converting the Outlook "On My Mac" folders and files to Apple Mail folders and files?

Thanks for any direction you might give me. Microsoft gives no indication of ever to again being able to support "On My Mac" email folders.

Running Monterey version 12.1 and Outlook Mac version 16.4.

iMac Line (2012 and Later)

Posted on Jan 14, 2022 4:16 PM

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Answer 1

MartinR

Level 6

19,315 points

Jan 21, 2022 7:03 AM in response to Guy Towle

Glad to be of help!

You may be interested to know that the author of Olminator, Bjorn Goerke, is the former CTO of SAP and President of SAP Cloud Platform. Interesting guy. He left SAP in 2019 after 30 years there (started as a student in 1988). Took a year off to bike across the US, then joined VW as CTO but only stayed one year. Developed & released Oliminator just 6 months ago. His Twitter feed is fascinating.

BTW, full documentation for Olminator is here --> https://goerke.tech/Mac/Olminator/

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Answer 2

MartinR

Level 6

19,315 points

Jan 15, 2022 7:36 AM in response to MartinR

Additional info ...

I did some research this morning and it appears that .mbox does not support subfolders. If that's the case then the mbox approach would require you to drag/create a separate mbox for each folder; after importing them into Apple/Mac Mail you should then be able to re-create the subfolder relationships inside Apple/Mac Mail.

If you have a massive Outlook file with, as you said, hundreds of subfolders, then the export to Outlook Archive (.olm) may be an easier approach even though you would have to find and perhaps purchase a conversion utility.

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Answer 3

Guy Towle Author

Level 1

28 points

Jan 20, 2022 2:53 PM in response to MartinR

Thanks again for your helpful comments and research. It turns out that using a third party conversion facility will allow the Outlook "On My Computer" email file folders and sub-folders (various nested levels) to by imported into Apple Mail successfully. The third party provider is a program called Olminator and it is available for free on the Apple App Store. It is extremely fast and efficient and integrates wiht Apple Mail nicely. It is created by a very helpful fellow who provides great support to the program, which has very detailed instructions. I have many thousands of emails in different folders and am in the process of getting them organized under Apple Mail now.

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Answer 4

MartinR

Level 6

19,315 points

Jan 18, 2022 10:00 AM in response to Guy Towle

Outlook itself creates the .olm file. (In Outlook, do File > Export.) I have done this myself and it works fine.

The conversion utility would take the .olm file as input and convert/import into Apple Mail.

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Answer 5

tbirdvet

Level 6

13,755 points

Jan 14, 2022 4:21 PM in response to Guy Towle

Yes, Apple mail has "on My Mac" structure. I have that now. I have not tried to convert outlook folders to Apple mail but I believe you can copy the folders from outlook to your desktop and then import into Apple Mail.

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Answer 6

MartinR

Level 6

19,315 points

Jan 14, 2022 6:31 PM in response to Guy Towle

You can drag a folder from Outlook onto the Desktop, which creates an .mbox file that can be imported into Apple/Mac Mail. It works quite well. (In Apple/Mac Mail, you do File > Import Mailboxes > Files in mbox format.)

However, I have never tried it with nested folders. You said you have hundreds of them. You would have to experiment to see if a folder containing subfolders can exported to .mbox and that the folder structure is preserved when you import it into Apple/Mac Mail.

The alternative is to export to an Outlook Archive (.olm file) which exports your entire Outlook database (selectively mail and/or contacts and/or calendar) but in that case you would need a conversion utility in order to import the .olm into Apple/Mac Mail.

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Answer 7

Guy Towle Author

Level 1

28 points

Jan 17, 2022 12:36 PM in response to MartinR

Thank. you Martin for your helpful research and answers. I will have to research conversion utilities and confirm that they can create an .olm file readable by the MacOS/Apple Mail facility and whether they can brink across the sub-folder structure (either on the way out of Outlook or on the way into Apple Mail.

Again = thanks so much for your help.

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"On My Mac" Email Folders - Outlook for Mac

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