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When you get a new computer, you will probably want to take all your mail and settings from your old computer along with you. Here’s how to do it …

BACKING UP

Step1: Open Outlook and right click Outlook Today’s [Personal Folders] then click Properties for “Personal Folders” from the menu.

Note: If you can’t see your email folders open the View menu and choose Folder List or Navigation Pane depending on which version of Outlook you have.

Step 2: In the Personal Folder Properties window, click the Advanced button. Right-click inside the Filename field and choose Select All, then right click again and click copy.

Step 3: Open the Start menu, point to Programs (or All Programs), point to Accessories, and click on Notepad.

Step 4: In Notepad, open the Edit menu and choose Paste to paste the folder path into the Notepad window.

Step 5: The very end of the path should contain the folder name and the extension .pst. Delete the end of the path until the last character is a backslash ( \ ) character.

Step 6: Press Control-A to select the entire modified path and press Control-C to copy it to the clipboard.

Step 7: Open the Start menu again and choose Run… Press Control-V to paste the path into the Run field. Click OK.

Windows will open the folder containing Outlook’s data files. These are the files which you must backup.

Outlook Mail Rules

If you don’t use mail rules, skip this step.

Mail Rules are used to automatically sort incoming or outgoing e-mail based on rules you can define in the Rules Wizard. If you want to move these to your new computer along with your Outlook data, follow these steps:

1. Open the Tools menu in Outlook and select Rules Wizard
2. At the bottom of the Rules Wizard screen, click the Options button.
3. Click Export Rules, type a file name for the exported Rules File, and click Save. You will need to copy this file to your new computer.

IMPORTING

The following instructions will be performed on your new computer

• Ensure Outlook is closed
  

To successfuly import your backed up mail files you will first need to download and install a free program called Unlocker available here.

• Once you have Unlocker installed, follow steps 1-7 from the BACKING UP section above, this will open the outlook data files folder.
• Select all files in this folder and right click. Then select Unlocker from the menu

• When Unlocker opens up, it will show all processes that are using the selected files. If you see a message that says “No locking handle found” then you can just click the Quit button, otherwise click the Unlock All button – the files will be unlocked and Unlocker will automatically close.

• Now, open the folder where you backed up the files from your other computer, select all files, copy and paste them into the Outlook data files folder on your new computer, overwrite all existing files.
• Restart computer, and open Outlook – all your mail should now be there!