1) Download and install “Yahoo! Zimbra Desktop” to export your email to your desktop. This is a free utility and will work without needing the Yahoo Plus! Pop3 type email account. Yes – it works on the free version of Yahoo email, without using Pop3. Zimbra is an unsupported application, but it works and there is a version for Windows, Linux and Mac
a. Download Yahoo! Zimbra here: (unsupported at the time of discovery, but it works very well): http://www.zimbra.com/products/desktop_download.html
b. Install and run per instructions – See the tabs on the website for features, user guide and FAQ
c. Once installed, run the program. Fill in your Yahoo! Account information.
d. The program then automatically finds each Yahoo! Folder and each email within each folder in the Yahoo account that you configured it for. This takes quite awhile. Wait for the program to finish finding all folders and emails. Failure to do so will result in your download not having all of your email. If you hover over each of the folders, you will see the progress. Also there is a little “Busy” indicator located just below the Yahoo! Zimba logo. The Idle indicator is a green dot, the busy indicator is a pulsing dot. Once Zimbra is idle go to the next step.
e. In Zimbra, click on the “options tab”. There is an import and export part of this page, scroll down to the export part of the page. Fill choose which files / file types you want to download. This will download a single .tgz (compressed) file that has your folders and within your folders, each email. There will be both an .eml file and an .eml.meta file for each email.
2) Uncompress the .tgz file. I used another free utility - PowerArchiver 6.1. I found the utility here: PowerArchiver 6.1
a. Download and install PowerArchiver. PowerArchiver works very much like WinZip. Click “Open Archive”, browse to the location of the .tgz file and click extract.
b. With the .tgz file open, click “Extract” to extract the files. Use the default extract location or browse to where you want the extracted files located.
3) Copy and Paste your .eml files into outlook express (do this even if you want your email to ultimately end up in Outlook, OE has a native exporter to Outlook). Also another free utility.
a. Open Outlook express. If this is the first time you opened OE, it may ask you for setup information. If you are migrating your email to Outlook, don’t follow the set-up wizard - you just want to temporarily use the OE folders.
b. Open Windows Explorer by clicking on “My computer”.
c. Arrange both Outlook Express and Windows explorer so that you can see both at the same time
d. Using Windows explorer, go to where you extracted your .eml files (step 2). You will see a directory tree similar in structure as your folders in Yahoo!.
e. Open each folder created by PowerArchiver, one at a time. For instance the “Inbox” folder.
f. View the open folder “Inbox” in “details” view.
g. Separate the .eml files from the .eml.meta files by sorting the folder by clicking on the “type” column.
h. Choose all the .eml files only and drag them into the “inbox” of Outlook express in the open Outlook Express window. See video on how to do this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAyQnggEv4s
i. You can create new folders in OE to organize your email within similar folders as you did in Yahoo!.
j. Repeat steps e-h until all desired email from the various folders are in Outlook Express. Don’t forget to copy and paste the “sent” email into the “sent” folder of OE.
k. Clean up your email. Re-organize, re-file, delete any unwanted email before proceeding.
4) Export Email from Outlook Express to Outlook
a. Once your files are re-organized and cleaned up, I created new, unique folders like “old-inbox” and “old-sent”. I moved my ‘inbox’ email to ‘old-inbox’ and moved my ‘sent’ email to ‘old-sent’.
b. Click on “File”, “export”, “Messages”. I chose “selected folders” and highlighted the two folders named above and hit “OK”.
c. My two folders appeared in outlook just as I had created them in OE. Now I can further manage my email and put them into the appropriate Outlook email folders or keep them just the way they are and access them on demand.
5) Clean up – If this was a one-time process.
a. Outlook Express.
i. Delete your Outlook Express folders or the mail within them or both
ii. Close Outlook Express.
b. Zimbra
i. Zimbra is running in the background. Go to your Icon tray and right click on the Zimbra icon. Choose shut down service.
ii. Uninstall Zimbra by going into control panel and click on “add or remove Programs”. Highlight “Yahoo! Zimbra” once the list is populated and click on “remove”
iii. Remove any Zimbra related folders
c. PowerArchiver
i. Go into control panel and click on “add or remove Programs”. Highlight PowerArchiver once the list is populated and click on “remove”.
d. Delete the .tgz file from its downloaded location.
e. Delete the extracted files created by the .tgz file from its extracted location