Mail - Getting Started
There are many email programs that people use on a Windows PC. I used Thunderbird. However, the most common email programs are probably Outlook and Outlook Express. Since Outlook Express is the program that comes with Windows that is the program I will use as my comparison.
First, you’re going to want to set up access to your mail server. In Outlook Express, you would go to Tools -> Accounts… and click on the Add->Mail… button. This will bring up the Internet Connection Wizard which prompts you to fill in the necessary information. On the Mac you will again run a wizard but to get to it you go to File->Add Account… so it is fewer steps to get started.
Once you have your account you will want to import your addresses. The Mac is nice in that its address book is a separate application that can be used by other applications like mail and ichat. In Windows each application will have its own address book.
On the Mac there is a help file on moving addresses from Outlook Express to the Mac (go to Help in the menu bar and type in “outlook”). Basically you transfer them as vCards. This works fine if your program uses standard names for the fields. However, non-standard fields will show up in the Notes section. Also, many names that my email program autosaved had extra commas in them. Also, you lose any grouping information you had. So be prepared to do a lot of hand editing to get the cards looking good. I would guess that I spent about 3 hours moving addresses from Thunderbird and contact information from the Palm Desktop into the Mac address book.
There are commands in both email programs for transferring messages but there doesn’t seem to be a way to go from Outlook Express to something that can be imported to the Mac. This wasn’t an issue for me because I store email on my mail server (I use an IMAP server) and in gmail so I didn’t have to worry about it.