100% Success

100% Success
by MisterMellow001 – Version 1.2 – Aug 30, 2011

It has bugged me for years that I have to go to Windows to open old Outlook messages. Exporting old messages in Outlook is unsatisfactory, so I’ve been looking for something to convert PST files to be read by
Apple Mail. This app converted tens of thousands of messages,contained within a series of PST archives dating as far back as 1996.
All I did was drag and drop all the PST archives into this app at once, choose the output format, and it processed them without a hitch and preserved their archive groupings. I tried all the conversion options (creating three different sets), and of the Apple Mail, MBOX, and EML conversion-output options, I found the latter best for my
purposes because it allows individual messages to be opened in Mail without loading the entire MBOX. Of course, sent/received dates in the EML conversion were not available in the finder, as the file creation
date is the day of conversion. But when opening the mail message, the header info is intact. But EML format used the subject line as the title of the message, so regardless of not knowing the sent/recieved date in the finder, I was able to ID the message by title. As archives imported into Mail, they all work like a charm. I don’t need access to
them via Mail, but I imported an archive of personal messages as a test, and the sent/recieved dates are all there, the header information is intact, and the attachments open. They imported into the “On My Mac” section of the Mailbox list, in a folder called “Import.” Within that folder, the app created a subfolder with the same title as the PST archive. It also converted my calendar, which I couldn’t be happier about, although I didn’t import all of them. I did
import some individually for hisorical record reasons. I didn’t try converting contacts because I had already exported them for use in Address Book before I quit using Windows. The only messages that weren’t converted with original formatting intact, as far as I’ve been able to tell, were some circa-1997 HTML-formatted newsletter emails.
The text was all there, but the layout wasn’t. This is no big deal, but it may be important to some. I don’t know of another app that will do better, though, so I don’t fault PST Converter Pro for this necessarily. The price of this app is steep, and kept me away from it for some time (I wonder if a lower price point would result in higher
sales for the developer). However, after trying a 99-cent competitor app with sketchy and unreliable results, I finally bit the bullet and purchased this app. The differences were apparent from the start.
Complete documentation, a conversion report, 100% conversion success, calender conversion, several conversion options, and a surprisingly “finished” look for a Version 1.2 app made it worth it to me, in retrospect, for solving a problem that’s been haunting me ever since I archived my Outlook stuff into those stupid proprieatry PST files
before leaving Windows.