Recently I purchased a new computer running Windows 7 (64-bit) with Microsoft Office 2010 and would like to migrate across the email from my old computer. I was using Outlook Express on the old computer and have copied all of the .DBX files onto an external hard drive which is connected to the new computer. However, I cannot understand how to import the email into Outlook 2010. A search of the internet brought up many results, but often just other users with the same issue but no fix. Can you help?

You are correct that importing mail from Outlook Express into Outlook 2007/2010 is a tricky task, as there is no direct import route from Outlook Express DBX files into these versions of Outlook. Instead, you need to go through the intermediate route of importing all your email into Windows Live Mail (which is the new version and equivalent of Outlook Express for Windows 7) and then you export the email from Windows Live Mail to Outlook 2010. This is necessary because even though Outlook 2007/2010 has the feature to import mail from Outlook Express or Windows Mail it cannot import the mail from DBX files. Instead, it will import the mail from the Windows Live Mail installation on your computer.

First, we need to install Windows Live Mail on your computer, as this does not come installed by default with Windows 7. Go to explore.live.com/windows-live-mail where you can download and then install Windows Live Mail. Once this has been installed on your computer, open Windows Live Mail. Be aware, since no email accounts have been configured in Windows Live Mail you will likely be presented with a first-run wizard asking you to setup the email account. We don’t want to setup your email accounts in this program, since we will not be using Windows Live Mail to read and write email (as it is just being used as an intermediate stop-over in the journey of migrating email from Outlook Express to Outlook 2010). Additionally, configuring the email could cause confusion in the future because if you are primarily using Outlook 2010 for email, but accidentally open Windows Live Mail, your new email could inadvertently download into Windows Live Mail before Outlook has an opportunity to download the messages (so that email will not download into Outlook). Therefore, I suggest that you put dummy information into the Windows Live Mail setup, just so that we can get Windows Live Mail working for the migration. Error messages will appear informing that it is unable to access the mail server (since you just put dummy information into the configuration) but that’s alright, as we don’t actually need to access the mail server for this procedure.

Once you have gone through the first-run wizard and Windows Live Mail opens to the home screen, go to the “File” menu > “Import” (if you cannot see the menu bar in Windows Live Mail then it may be hidden, so press the ALT key to trigger the display of the menu so that you can select the “File” menu). This will open the Windows Live Mail Import wizard which will guide you through the import process. The first screen will ask for the format of email you will be importing and you should select “Microsoft Outlook Express 6” then click “Next”. On the next screen you need to select the location of your Outlook Express mail store files. Click the “Browse” button and specify the folder containing the mail store (DBX) files on the external hard drive. Once the folder has been selected, and the path is displayed on the wizard screen, click the “Next” button. The screen that next appears allows you to specify which folders to import. Since you likely wish to import all folders into Windows Live Mail (and eventually Outlook 2010), select the “All folders” option. However, if you did want to only import specific folders (or exclude specific folders) then you can also do this by using the other available options. Once you have made your choice click “Next” to proceed. The messages will commence importing into Windows Live Mail and when this procedure is complete click the “Finish” button. You will notice in Windows Live Mail that all of the imported messages are contained within the “Imported Folders”. At this point I would not bother reorganising the folders and messages into any other hierarchy, as this can be done once they are imported into Outlook 2010.

Now we are halfway through the procedure, as we have successfully imported the messages into Windows Live Mail which can then be exported into Outlook 2010. However, before transferring the messages across to Outlook 2010 we need to setup Outlook correctly with your email account. Open Outlook 2010 and proceed to setup your email account information. If you have never run Outlook before then it should show a first run wizard guiding you through the account setup process. If you have used Outlook previously, but not setup your email accounts, click the Office button located in the top left-hand corner of the Outlook window and select “Info” and then choose whether you would like to either “Add Account” to setup a new email account, or go into the “Account Settings” to modify an existing email account (or partially setup email account). Unlike the dummy information we input into Windows Live Mail, you actually need to put your real account information into Outlook since we will be using Outlook as your real email client. After the email account has been setup, close Outlook 2010 and we can proceed with the email migration.

Interestingly, we don’t actually import the messages from Windows Live Mail into Outlook 2010 using Outlook 2010. Instead, we export the messages from Windows Live Mail into Outlook 2010 using Windows Live Mail. Therefore, open Windows Live Mail and go to the “File” menu > “Export” > “Messages”. The Windows Live Mail Export wizard will appear allowing us to specify the destination of the mail export. Select “Microsoft Exchange”. Even though this option is labelled Microsoft Exchange it really means Microsoft Outlook, so the messages should export into Outlook. A confirmation message will appear saying “This will export messages from Windows Live Mail to Microsoft Outlook or Microsoft Exchange”. This seems to be exactly what we want to do, so click OK to agree and dismiss this message. A window may appear asking which profile in Outlook you wish to export the messages into. A profile is just a configuration of Outlook. Since you should only have one profile setup (i.e. your normal email configuration) just select that profile and click OK. Next, a screen will appear asking which folders you wish to export into Outlook. Much like when importing the messages into Windows Live Mail you can either select “All” or “Selected Folders” and manually select the folders to export. I suggest you keep it simple and select “All” then delete any unnecessary folders from Outlook once the messages have been migrated. Click OK and the export should commence and when that has completed, click the “Finish” button. You can now close Windows Live Mail and open Outlook 2010 and all your messages should be present.

At this point, to avoid confusion in the future, I would recommend that you uninstall Windows Live Mail from your computer. Having multiple email clients can get confusing, so this will simplify matters further. Assuming that you have kept your original email backup on the external hard drive that should be unaffected, and I would recommend that you keep the email backup just in case it is needed in the future.