NOW, I want to transfer OE FOLDERS FROM WIN 2000 TO NEW WIN 7 MACHINE. These are in a multi level tree structure.

Thank you
Leo

Thanks in advance

However there was one further issue which took me ages to identify.

On my XP computer, there were separate e-mail accounts on OE for each of three computer users. However, all of us could see each other’s mail folders, and send/receive sent and received mail for all three accounts, irrespective of which account was in use at the time. OK, security issues, but it suited us. All three addresses used subfolders within the same mail store location, moved from the C:\ drive for reasons relating to a dual boot with W98. The mail folders were more or less separate, thanks to the use of Message Rules.

On WLM, this appears to be difficult – I won’t say impossible! Try and do someone else’s e-mails from your account and it starts prompting for a password. So I had to allocate each identity to a user account and import it accordingly. That works, but it does mean that user 2 cannot see what user 1′s e-mails are (or sync them) without going into user 1′s account. Given the somewhat randomised way in which e-mails would be sent to us, that is a pain.

The biggest mistake I made was before importing anything. I set each user’s message store to be the same folder, expecting it to mirroe the OE position. As a result I found all three users’ e-mails visible from any account (fine) but send/receive getting disrupted by password requests (definitely not fine). If, like me, you don’t like having data on the boot partition, but if you do change the message store locations, make sure they are entirely separate folders!

A final comment. Documentation tends to imply that this migration is really easy with tools like Windows Easy File Transfer. Perhaps this is true if you have been a Redmond-approved boy and kept all your files in the original default locations. Lots of us don’t, for good reasons or bad. I had five partitions on my hard disk in XP, plus a W98 boot partition. For all those reasons, I did not trust WEFT to associate the right data with the right user account, or even to find it at all, so I did not let it loose. Maybe it would have worked, but now I will never know. But guidance form Microsoft (and the majority of online sites which repeat what MS have told them!) really does not take into account real world situations properly. Any number of Google searches got me nowhere, until I discovered .iaf files on this excellent site. And the bit about identities being more tightly linked to user accounts is not clear without clicking Identities and/or help on Identities. As it was far from clear that was the problem, it took me a lot of wasted time and effort to achieve, finally, a successful migration.

Keep up the good work!

Congratulations on the quality of the responses provided and a Happy New Year to you.

My old XP laptop died a couple of weeks ago and I had to buy a new Windows 7 laptop. I had a computer guy put the old hard disk into an external USB case (which works fine) so I at least have access to all my data. Now I just need to set everything up on the new laptop!

I know where my old outlook express 6 emails (.dbx files) are sitting on the hard drive, but can you please advise how your solution above might vary considering I wasn’t able to create export files for my email account, address book and stored emails before trying to import into Windows 7 (Live Mail). I hope you can assist.

Regards,
Scott