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Friday, 13 March 2009
After making the decision to migrate from one online email provider to another you may expect it to be a simple process to take your contacts and email folders with you. However, few providers offer export facilities for these functions. You could probably save emails manually or copy and paste contacts but there really should be a simpler way to make this change.
For example, you might want to migrate from AOL to Google Mail, but how do you get your information across quickly and easily?
There are a number of methods for extracting information from an email service. Of these, a number of options available to help with this transfer are listed below. I hope to test some of these platforms in the near future and if you have experience of any of them let me know about it in comments below.
ePreserver
“Convert your AOL email, favorites and contacts to Outlook or Outlook Express.”
AOL sync
“Combines your AOL contacts and calendar events from Outlook, Windows Mobile, and your mobile phone.”
ACtoCDF – AOL Contacts to Comma Delimited File
”ACtoCDF – AOL Address Book Converter”
Mail Forward for Windows
”Forward your AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, Netscape, Yahoo, POP, and IMAP mail to any e-mail address!”
According to Chris Comella’s Blog for contacts alone, you could sign up to a service like Plaxo which will allows you to import contacts from AOL and synchronise with various versions of Outlook – it is a bit longer process but if you use a service like this already it might yield additional benefits for you.
Google have some tips on exporting contacts from other mail providers, including Yahoo!, Hotmail, Hotmail Live, orkut, and Outlook.
What are your experiences of extracting mail and contacts from an online webmail provider?
Related
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- Why I need Xobni to manage my e-mail
- GFI Mail Archiver now supports Exchange Server 2007
- How To See Mail Headers In Outlook
Hi,
I’m the author of ePreserver. Here are a few thoughts that may be useful.
The products you presented are mostly complementary. ePreserver is a migration product, AOL sync is a “sync” product, and Mail Forward for Windows is a co-existence product. For some people, it will make sense to use all three of these products. (Remember that the AOL client keeps old email split between the client and the server, so solutions that only work against the server are not sufficient.)
ePreserver and ACtoCDF are the only products that compete. However, ACtoCDF only converts address books whereas ePreserver converts address books, email and favorites.
ACtoCDF has some limitations when converting address books to Gmail. ACtoCDF uses a technology that ePreserver stopped using four years ago because it was too unreliable and too complicated for customers. ePreserver now reads the address book directly from AOL’s filing cabinet and stores it directly into Gmail. No user involvement is required. In contrast, ACtoCDF requires several manual steps and fails to transfer several fields, such as postal addresses and distribution lists.
There are several other address book tools, such as Transend and AOLeave, but these solutions stopped working after AOL 6 when AOL started encrypting the address book.
Questions? Send me email at: info (at) connectedsw.com.
Thanks for the pointers Jim, I hope this information is useful to anyone who is having difficulty transferring information from an online mail provider, like AOL, to another platform.