The other day I was migrating a customer's setup from their old PC to a new one. Regarding Outlook, they were going from Outlook 2010 to Outlook 2024, involving a giant PST file and a POP3 mail setup (which is how they wanted to keep it).
From experience, I've learned that the best way to achieve this in Outlook is to start afresh on the new machine, have it set up a PST file from scratch, download whatever mail is waiting (though ensuring that the old setup didn't have "leave mail forever on the server" enabled), weed out any emails that are likely going to be in the old PST file, then import the old PST file. One might think that pointing Outlook at the old PST file as the primary mail store would make sense but historically it would throw an error. Importing a PST takes ages but hey ho, it's quicker than the alternatives (e.g. mount PST file as additional data file and transfer mails to new PST file).
So this was my plan, but my mind wasn't on the ball so I transferred the customer's Documents folder across (including the PST file in the default location "%userprofile%\Documents\Outlook Files"), then I set up Outlook with the old PST file in the 'correct' name and location. To my surprise, Outlook 2024 succeeded in setting up the mail account, connected up to the PST file, *and* retained the POP state so no duplicate mails!
Another thing that happened which really baffled me was that I'm also used to spoon-feeding Outlook the old Autocomplete DAT file using NirSoft's NK2Edit, but somehow (and I'm absolutely certain that I did not absent-mindedly transfer the old AutoComplete DAT file! Also, I've tried a bait-and-switch before and Outlook said no), the new Outlook setup had an Autocomplete DAT file that was a very similar size to the old one and was populated with the thousands of results that one would expect. The file creation date on the new file indicates it was created on the new machine. My only theory is that Outlook did a quick scan of the 'Sent' folder?
From experience, I've learned that the best way to achieve this in Outlook is to start afresh on the new machine, have it set up a PST file from scratch, download whatever mail is waiting (though ensuring that the old setup didn't have "leave mail forever on the server" enabled), weed out any emails that are likely going to be in the old PST file, then import the old PST file. One might think that pointing Outlook at the old PST file as the primary mail store would make sense but historically it would throw an error. Importing a PST takes ages but hey ho, it's quicker than the alternatives (e.g. mount PST file as additional data file and transfer mails to new PST file).
So this was my plan, but my mind wasn't on the ball so I transferred the customer's Documents folder across (including the PST file in the default location "%userprofile%\Documents\Outlook Files"), then I set up Outlook with the old PST file in the 'correct' name and location. To my surprise, Outlook 2024 succeeded in setting up the mail account, connected up to the PST file, *and* retained the POP state so no duplicate mails!
Another thing that happened which really baffled me was that I'm also used to spoon-feeding Outlook the old Autocomplete DAT file using NirSoft's NK2Edit, but somehow (and I'm absolutely certain that I did not absent-mindedly transfer the old AutoComplete DAT file! Also, I've tried a bait-and-switch before and Outlook said no), the new Outlook setup had an Autocomplete DAT file that was a very similar size to the old one and was populated with the thousands of results that one would expect. The file creation date on the new file indicates it was created on the new machine. My only theory is that Outlook did a quick scan of the 'Sent' folder?