Import eMails & Mailbox From Apple Mail to Microsoft Outlook 2011 OSX

It’s not currently possible to export mailboxes from Apple Mail.app to something that Microsoft Outlook 2011 can import directly. Here’s a way to fix it, for FREE!!!

The issue is due to the FSTypeCode not being set by Apple Mail.app, which is actually really easy to fix.

First, in Mail.app, export the mailbox(s) you want to import in Microsoft Outlook 2011.

In my case, after I select my Archive mailbox, I get:
$ ls -1 Inbox2007.mbox

The Apple mbox format is actually a folder that contains a few files inside:
$ ls -1 Inbox2007.mbox Info.plist
mbox
table_of_contents

Where mbox is the real mbox and only tfile we need to import into Outlook, but if we try now (Import -> Contacts or messages from a text file -> Import messages from an MBOX-format text file) we’ll see the mbox file in the Finder is greyed out. This is because the FSTypeCode is not set:
$ mdls Inbox2007.mbox/mbox | grep 'FSTypeCode' kMDItemFSTypeCode = ""

What we need to do is to change the code to TEXT. We can do this with a simple command (I used find since I exported several mboxes at once):
$ find . -name '*.mbox' -exec SetFile -t 'TEXT' {}/mbox \; -print ./Inbox2007.mbox

If we now test for the FSTypeCode, we verify it’s correctly set as TEXT
$ mdls Inbox2007.mbox/mbox | grep 'FSTypeCode'
kMDItemFSTypeCode = "TEXT"

We can now finally go back to Outlook and import the mbox file: Import - > Contacts or messages from a text file -> Import messages from an MBOX-format text file.

Thats it!!!


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