Thursday 20 December 2012

Windows Live Mail transfer

The old laptop had Windows XP. There were both Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail used as a mail clients. The new machine is running a newly re-installed Windows Vista. Windows Easy Transfer moved the Outlook Express emails without any problem into Vista's Windows Mail.

I didn't found an appropriate choice in the Windows Easy Transfer for the emails in the Windows Live Mail. I copied  all contents of the folder 'Documents and Settings\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\' from the old computer into the folder 'Users\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail' on the new computer. When starting, Windows Live Mail did run a recovery process. Even though the e-mail accounts were preserved, all messages were lost.

After some registry tweaks and numerous trials, I copied the data once again. Now, I removed *.chk, *.log and *.sqm files in Vista's WLM-folder. I deleted the *.chk and *.log files in subdirectories also ( Backup\new\, Calendars\DBStore\, Calendars\DBStore\LogFiles\, Calendars\DBStore\Backup\new\ ). In practice, the files Mail.MSMessageStore and Mail.pat as well as the subdirectories of the accounts and the messages remained. Now after starting the WLM the messages of the POP3 accounts were preserved also.