Outlook, IMAP, and winmail.dat

I’m probably the 100 millionth Microsoft Outlook user who ran into the dreaded winmail.dat-issue while switching from POP3 to IMAP. I posted to the microsoft.public.outlook newsgroup for help, but got none.

In the meantime I found a rather straight forward solution to move all my Outlook email from a .pst/.ost file to the IMAP server. You just have to leave the Microsoft world:

  1. Install Mozilla Thunderbird
  2. Tell it to import the email from your current Outlook installation
  3. Create a new IMAP account in Thunderbird
  4. Move all the imported email to the IMAP server with Thunderbird
  5. In case you still want to switch back to Outlook – chances are that you won’t, since Outlook is a real bitch when it comes to IMAP support:
    1. Uninstall Thunderbird
    2. Create a new IMAP account in Outlook
    3. Delete your old POP3 account

2 thoughts on “Outlook, IMAP, and winmail.dat

  1. works great – perhaps not a “one click solution” but with a little bit of folder drag and drop it is a real good idea…
    thunderbird createda all my outlook folders in the local area – then i sent them to my imap account.
    once again – thank you from oliver/berlin

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