Recently I’ve bought a new iMac. Real great machine, but I used to be a Windows Vista user, so I needed to export files and settings to Mac. Most of it was no problem, the only problem was: Email. On Windows I did use Microsoft Outlook to access my Hotmail, Gmail and own domain email account.

Most of you know, Outlook uses .pst files to store the mails locally. But you can’t import them directly into Mac Mail. So I needed to export them to a format Mac Mail knows. There are several (paid) tools available to convert Outlook mails to Mac Mail, but I didn’t want to pay for a tool I only use once.

Mac Mail support import from Mozilla Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a free mail client and works on both Windows and Mac. And the major upside, Thunderbird support import from Outlook. So I ran into an article how to import emails from Outlook to Thunderbird. And this is how I did do it:

1. Install Thunderbird on your Windows machine (Outlook needs to be running on the machine when you import to Thunderbird)
2. Import the messages using Tools -> Import -> Mail.
3. Close Thunderbird and copy the Thunderbird Profile directory from C:\Users\<Windows username>\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\<Profile name>\ to your Mac (I used a Windows shared folder to do this)
4. Import the Thunderbird files to Mac Mail using File -> Import Mailboxes

And now you have a “On my Mac” folder in Mac Mail, where the imported mails are stored.

Recently Hotmail has enabled POP3. So you can easily use this to access your Hotmail accounts via Mac Mail, or any other mail client. These are the settings (from LifeHacker.com):

POP server: pop3.live.com (Port 995)

POP SSL required? Yes

User name: Your Windows Live ID, for example yourname@hotmail.com

Password: The password you usually use to sign in to Hotmail or Windows Live

SMTP server: smtp.live.com (Port 25)

Authentication required? Yes (this matches your POP username and password)

TLS/SSL required? Yes