Transferring Outlook 2003 from one pc to another

[Darren Ingram]

Hi all,

I have Outlook 2003 on a desktop computer (XP) and I'm shipping that back
home from the UK to Australia. I also have Outlook 2003 installed on my Dell
1555 laptop (Vista x64). I transferred over the .pst files and everything
seemed alright.

Glitch is, when I logged onto my server it started downloading a second
copy of my emails which I've dragged over. 4000 of them...... arhhhh.

I'm using POP with the message being written back to the server so that I
can view my email throught Googlemail whilst at work or somewhere my laptop
isn't.

Any thoughts as to how I can down load all my new email without downloading
the old ones that are already in the .pst file?

Regards,

 

[Brian Tillman [MVP - Outlook]]

Any thoughts as to how I can down load all my new email without downloading
the old ones that are already in the .pst file?

The Oultook on one PC cannot know what messages you have downloaded on the
other PC. That informaiton is not available in a transferred PST. You have a
few ways to address the issue. 1) Switch to using an IMAP account instead of
a POP account. 2) Let the duplicates download and then get a dup remover to
clean them out. 3) Log into the mailbox via your web browser and move the
messages in the server's Inbox to another folder. If they're not in Inbox,
Outlook can't see them and won't download them. 4) Create a new, empty PST,
make it your delivery location, allow all the old messages to download, switch
back to the original PST for delivery, then delete the added PST with the
duplicates.

 

[Darren Ingram]

Thanks Brian,

Not the answer I was looking for but in the back of my mind it was the
answer that I knew was coming.... I thought that Outlook might have had a
tricky solution. I didn't want to download 500mb of email......but if I
leave it on at night it should get done.

Thanks anyway for your reply.

D

 

[Roady [MVP]]

You can create a rule to move these "redownloaded" items into a separate
folder so you won't have to sort out the duplicates later.
See http://www.howto-outlook.com/faq/duplicates.htm

It might not help you right now, but there is a change in behavior for this
planned in Outlook 2010.
The download history will then be stored within the pst-file. If you then
were to set up a new mail profile/mail account and configure it directly
with your previous pst-file, it will not redownload all the emails.
Of course this would only work with a transfer form Outlook 2010 to Outlook
2010 (and hopefully future versions as well).