In the article on Exporting emails from Mail I had a look at how export emails manually from Mail. It's possible to export emails in a similar manner from Microsoft Outlook for macOS.
When selecting the Export menu item in Outlook it offers only the olm format which is a format that only Outlook understands. It's possible to export to mbox and eml by dragging mailboxes or emails to the desktop.
There is one big benefit of using Outlook. The Microsoft developers can actually count. If I have a number of emails in a mailbox then I can be sure that the number of emails is correct.
Export to olm - old Outlook only
Outlook has a menu item for exporting. The export functionality has 2 drawbacks:
- It exports everything - not just the selected mailboxes.
- The export is done to the olm format. Which is a proprietary format that only Outlook can read or write.
Both exporting and importing emails are not available in new Outlook. I found a thread on the Microsoft Support forum from November 2020. Which is in September 2022 almost 2 years old. And 1893 users have the same problem. Nice!
Export to mbox
In old Outlook it's possible to drag a complete mailbox to the desktop. I saw the pizza for a minute or so and then the file was created on the desktop. The mailbox has 3626 emails in Outlook. After importing the mailbox into Mail Archiver I got 3625 emails. Almost perfect.
Dragging a mailbox to the desktop in the latest beta of new Outlook didn't do anything. No message - nothing. Really nice!
Dragging emails to the desktop
Dragging emails in old Outlook to the desktop worked fine. Outlook even showed me the number of emails I was dragging. I made a mess of my Desktop again despite trying to drag the emails to a folder:
I dug out my email with 255 รถ as subject and dragged the email to the desktop. The result was a message with the name "Message.eml". Dragging the same message again gave me "Message[1].eml". So there is minimal intelligence but not too much. At least until I came to new Outlook.
In new Outlook dragging emails to the desktop worked fine. Using my email with the long subject gave the same result as Mail. Namely, nothing.
Verdict
Dragging emails to the Desktop always ends in a mess for me. I like my Desktop tidy. Cutting off file names that are too long seems is too complex for Microsoft. In old Outlook at least something works with the mbox.
It's really unfortunate that Microsoft is pushing an application that clearly still is in alpha.
