Finding an easy way to move my e-mail back into XP proved more difficult. Outlook Express's import function won't import Vista Mail's .eml messages wholesale. The following method is simple and suffices--if you have a taste for the tedious.
You can save Vista Mail's messages to a safe place and then drag them directly into the Outlook Express window. But if you have a lot of sorted e-mail, you must manually recreate your folder structure--which is where the tedium commences. Here's the step-by-step:
1. In Vista, save your e-mail repository to a safe place on another partition or drive before you install or overwrite Vista with XP. Find the repository in: C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsMail\ Local Folders (Username is your user name). You can redirect the repository to another location by using the Tools, Options, Advanced, Maintenance, Store Folder function, or you can export in Mail format to another location. I recommend the latter (or both).
2. After you've installed XP, open Outlook Express, open an Explorer window pointed to the safe location you copied the .eml files to, select them, then drag and drop them to the folder in OE where you want them. As I mentioned, you must recreate the folders yourself.
The above method works, but I have over 250 folders into which I sort e-mail or have archived for particular projects, so I really, really wanted a better way. Since I had Office 2007 with Outlook (any recent version of Office Outlook will do), I hit on the idea of importing the messages into Outlook from Mail under Vista, then transferring them back from Outlook to Outlook Express in XP. It's a slightly convoluted process, but it requires no tedious labor and works like a charm.
