Exporting Mail and Address book to Windows PC

tilttilt
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Hi



I tried to do a forum search on "Mail Export" and "Address Book Export" and came up with nothing, hence I am posting this here.



I am taking up a one year project in a different province and cannot take my Mac with me. I shall be given a Windows laptop. I want to back up my mail and address book as plain text files so that I can open them with Notepad.exe when I need to refer to something.



Would someone tell me how I can export my mailboxes and address book to plain text files please?



I tried to open the .mbox files in Textedit to see if I could just copy the .mbox files onto a CD and be done with it, but oddly enough Textedit says it cananot open the .mbox files. I thought that .mbox is just like in Linux, where I could indeed open them with any editor!



Cheers

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    project2501project2501 Posts: 433member
    This forums search function has been broken for a while.

    Doesn't both Mail.app and Address book have the save as text in menu bar. In mail it's File > Save As.. and there format = plain text

    In Address book, it's under File > export Vcard... It doesn't create txt files, but you can still open those in text editor. You should also be able to copy those Vcards into outlooks address book. You could also try to sync your emails and address book with your cell phone and then sync it with your pc. Also Ipod can transfer your address book.
  • Reply 2 of 2
    tilttilt Posts: 396member
    Thank you Project. My aim is NOT to transfer my emails and contacts to Outlook or to the PC, but merely to save them as text files so that I can open them with any editor.



    I tried what you said with Mail by marking all messages and savinf as plain text, that worked, thank you. I just thought that since Mail uses the mbox format, that the mbox format behaved exactly like it does it Linux and that it was already a plain text file. Looks like I was wrong on that.



    As for Address book, I want all contacts in one file, which the vcard export will apparently not do (from what I understand of your reply), but I managed to print the whole address book to a PDF file and save that. That serves my purpose quite adequately.



    Thanks again for your help



    Cheers
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