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moving mailboxes from a POP account to a new Exchange account

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by Matt

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A friend had a POP account and set up over 60 mailbox folders within this account going back to the late 90s. he had filters set up which actively filtered email into the appropriate mailbox. This is on a Mac and he is running the latest version of Thunderbird for OS X. I was able to move his profile to the next machine, so the old POP is there with all its mailboxes.

He has now been forced to move to an Exchange account because of university security requirements. This required that a new Exchange account was set up - it did and it works fine. So we have two problems:

1. How do we move the old POP mailboxes from the old account to the new? I tried just dragging the mailboxes from the old POP account to the new Exchange account but they won't copy.

2. Is there any way to move the filters over without having to remake each one?

I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.

A friend had a POP account and set up over 60 mailbox folders within this account going back to the late 90s. he had filters set up which actively filtered email into the appropriate mailbox. This is on a Mac and he is running the latest version of Thunderbird for OS X. I was able to move his profile to the next machine, so the old POP is there with all its mailboxes. He has now been forced to move to an Exchange account because of university security requirements. This required that a new Exchange account was set up - it did and it works fine. So we have two problems: 1. How do we move the old POP mailboxes from the old account to the new? I tried just dragging the mailboxes from the old POP account to the new Exchange account but they won't copy. 2. Is there any way to move the filters over without having to remake each one? I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.

Chosen solution

1. You have to copy mails to the new folder he manually creates. (Exchange is not designed with any sort of migration in mind) You could move the mail to the local folders and have it exist solely in the local machine. But it sounds like your friend is trying to use exchange like pop. Before you even think of that, is there sufficient storage provided on the exchange server for the mail going back to the 1990s. Exchange, like IMAP has a copy on the mail server. SO you might want to investigate space before even trying to move anything

2. No.

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Chosen Solution

1. You have to copy mails to the new folder he manually creates. (Exchange is not designed with any sort of migration in mind) You could move the mail to the local folders and have it exist solely in the local machine. But it sounds like your friend is trying to use exchange like pop. Before you even think of that, is there sufficient storage provided on the exchange server for the mail going back to the 1990s. Exchange, like IMAP has a copy on the mail server. SO you might want to investigate space before even trying to move anything

2. No.

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Thanks for the response. Sorry I was not clear. The POP account is history - he will never use it again. I created a regular Exchange account for him, using OWL I think, and it is working fine. He has email going back to the 90s sorted into 50 to 60 mailboxes in the old POP account and he wants to move these mailboxes/folders into his current account. I see what you mean - if he was to drag the old boxes into the current Exchange account it would try to copy them back up to the Exchange account. He found he could create local mailboxes and then manually drag the email from an old folder to a new folder.

  So he should be able to drag the old account mailboxes into the Local Computer area and the folders should copy or is he stuck doing it box by box by box?
  I can also see he is going to have to recreate the 50 or 60 filters to filter into the new boxes.

Thanks for your help.

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I would recommend folder by folder. It is slower, but less prone to error. 60 clicks is not really a lot of extra "slower"