For the past 18 months I’ve been using Windows Live Mail. It has some great functionality and capabilities (newsreader, outlook like effects, etc) however it just wasn’t Outlook. As I’ve been fully in to my Office 2010 testing, I thought, let’s export my Windows Live Mail to Outlook and start using the full monty. First thing to be made aware of – Windows Live Mail only works 32 bit and the new Outlook has 64 bit capabilities. You can’t export from WLM on an x64 machine to Outlook x64. The MAPI handlers just don’t like it. Therefore I built a 32 bit VM and exported WLM to Exchange (which in essence makes a .pst file).
Presto, the .pst contained all of my mail and I was happy as Larry (where does that saying come from?). Any way, I went to respond to a mail and found out the export wasn’t really a true export. In the mail listing pane I saw this:
You’ll notice a difference between the top mail and the bottom two. The icon on the bottom signifies I haven’t opened the mail…Well, not really true. I had opened the mail, but I had done so in WLM. The preview pane showed positive signs of transferral:
It showed the mail name, but I couldn’t double click on it and if I chose reply, it put the full name, but there was no GAL to cross-reference it to, hence it wouldn’t send. I though to myself, I wonder if it exported all of the details…I opened the mail to look at the headers and what did I find:
Oops, nothing!
So, when choosing your mail tool of choice, if at any time you wish to swap to and or fro, realise that as with any program, when exporting or migrating the data, there are “quirks” to be aware of, and this is one of them (well two if you take in to account the x64 compatibility issue).
Happy e-mailing 
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