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Transferring E-mail From Your Old E-mail Account To Mail@umd Or To Your Hard Drive

The purpose of this document is to help those who are switching to the new Mail@umd system, or losing their account space due to separation from the university, to relocate any e-mail they still have in their old e-mail account into their new account or onto their local hard drive for storage purposes.

When you used the web-based Mail@umd Account Activation web page as part of the activation process, you were given the option of copying some of your e-mail from your old account (either WAM, Glue, or Deans) to your new Mail@umd account. If you only used one of these accounts for e-mail and you were successful in copying all of your e-mail from your old account, then you probably don't need to read the rest of this web page.

On the other hand, if you used more than one e-mail account for receiving or storing e-mail, or if you were unable to copy all of the e-mail you wanted into your new account because there was not enough space, then you still need to relocate some of your e-mail either into your new account or onto your hard drive (Note: if you have not completed the activation process, you will only have the option of saving the e-mail to your local drives).

The best method for relocating your e-mail is to use your current graphical e-mail client (such as Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook, SeaMonkey, Entourage, or OS X Mail) to move your e-mail folders and messages from one place to another. The following steps will take you through this relocation process.

Step 1: Open Your E-Mail Client

The first step is to open the e-mail client you used to check your e-mail on the old system. Even though you activated your new Mail@umd account, you will still be able to access your old e-mail account--the only thing that has changed is that any new e-mail sent to your old e-mail address will be automatically forwarded to your new e-mail address.

• Note: If you used to check your old e-mail account with a text-based e-mail program like Pine or Berkley mail, you will want to create a graphical e-mail client for the purpose of relocating your mail and mail folders. Step-by-step instructions for creating one of the many e-mail clients used on campus are at http://www.helpdesk.umd.edu/topics/applications/email

Hopefully, you are already familiar with how your e-mail folders are organized in your e-mail client. By default, all of the mainstream e-mail clients display a list of your e-mail folders, usually on the left side of your e-mail client window, in a separate column. The following example of this is from the Outlook Express client in Windows:

All of the mainstream e-mail clients allow you to save e-mail in "local" e-mail folders (in this case, "local" means that the files or messages are located either on your hard drive or on a mapped network drive, rather than inside your e-mail account). The different e-mail clients have different names to refer to local folders (Thunderbird calls them Local Folders, Outlook calls them Personal Folders, Entourage lists them under "On My Computer," and OS X Mail lists them under "On My Mac"), but the concept is the same.

If you have your e-mail client configured to "POP" your e-mail (to connect to the POP server for your e-mail account), then you may only have local folders listed since all your e-mail is downloaded into these folders. Many people, however, configure their e-mail client to check their e-mail via an IMAP server. If that's the way your e-mail client is configured, then, in addition to your local folders, you will see another mailbox or mailbox service listed (the Eudora e-mail client refers to them as "personalities"), and it will contain the Inbox folder where you see the messages you have received. In the example above, this mailbox service is named imap.wam.umd.edu. If you have other mail folders in your old e-mail account where you stored e-mail, they should also be listed under this mailbox service.

In Outlook Express, the local folders are listed before the mailbox service folders, but in other e-mail clients like Thunderbird, the local folders are listed last.

Step 2: Configuring Your E-Mail Client to Access Your Mail@umd Mail and Folders

The next step is to configure your e-mail client to access your Mail@umd account. All of the mainstream e-mail clients currently supported by Office of Information Technology (OIT) are capable of reading e-mail from a multiple of e-mail accounts, so configuring your e-mail client to access your new account will not affect its ability to access the e-mail and e-mail folders in your old account.

Click on the appropriate link below for instructions on configuring your client to access your new e-mail account:

Thunderbird (Windows and Macintosh)
Outlook 2000
Outlook Express 5.x and 6 (Windows)
OS X Mail
SeaMonkey
Entourage 2008
Outlook XP/2003

Step 3: Prepare to Relocate your E-Mail

Now that you have configured your e-mail client to access your Mail@umd account, you should see the Mail@umd mailbox or mailbox service listed along with your other mailboxes. The following example is like the Outlook Express example from Step 1, but this time with the Mail@umd service:

Notice in the image above, the list of folders under "Local Folders" has been "collapsed" (hidden). Most e-mail clients allow you to hide the mail folders or subfolders from view if you don't want to see the entire list. You can hide and unhide the folder list by clicking on whatever symbol is to the left of the mailbox or folder name, such as a plus or minus sign or a little triangle.

Under your Mail@umd service, you will have an Inbox listed. The Inbox is where all of your incoming mail will arrive. If you used the Account Activation tool to copy some of your e-mail into your new account, it will also be listed in the Inbox. You may also see one or two other mail folders because some e-mail clients create special folders when they connect to your mail account for the first time. In the example above, Outlook Express created the Sent Items folder to hold copies of e-mail messages that you send. If you're not sure what these special folders are, consult the Help files for your e-mail client (you can usually do this by going to the menu bar of your e-mail client and clicking on Help).

At this point, you have to decide where you want to put your old e-mail. If you want to move it into your Mail@umd account, you could move the mail into your Mail@umd Inbox, or you could create new mail folders in your Mail@umd account to hold the e-mail. You have those same two choices if you want to move the e-mail to your local folders.

Keep in mind that any e-mail that you store in local mail folders will only be accessible to you when you sit at that computer. For example, you will not be able to access the local mail folders that you have on your computer at work from your computer at home, and vice versa. Any e-mail that you need to be able to access from anywhere should be saved in your Mail@umd account.

The method for creating new mail folders varies between e-mail clients. In most of the e-mail clients supported by OIT, you can create a new mail folder by doing the following:

1. Click once on the mailbox service (like mail.umd.edu in the example above) so that it is highlighted.
2. Go to the menu bar for the e-mail client.
3. Click on File.
4. Choose from the File menu, either New Folder (if listed) or New and then Folder or New Folder.

At that point, you will be prompted to name the new folder, and in some cases you will be asked where you want to put the new folder (by default, it will put the new folder in the mailbox service you highlighted). The example below illustrates the three steps in Outlook Express for Windows.

If the e-mail client you use does not allow you to create new mail folders using the above method, consult with your e-mail client's Help files on creating mail folders.

If you plan on simply moving your old e-mail into your Mail@umd Inbox folder, or into your Inbox folder in your local folders, then you don't have to create any new folders.

Once you've created the new mail folders you want, you are ready to start relocating your e-mail folders and e-mail messages from your old account to either your new account or your hard drive.

Step 4: Relocating the E-Mail

The actual process of relocating your e-mail is fairly simple and should work the same for all e-mail clients. Again, we will use Outlook Express as an example.

1. Open the mail folder in the old e-mail account that contains the messages you want to move.

2. Select the messages you want to move. You can select more than one message at a time by doing the following:
   • To select an entire block of e-mail messages, click once on the first message. Then, while holding down the Shift key on your keyboard, scroll down to the last message you want to select and click once on it. All of the messages inbetween the first message and the last message will also be selected.

     

   • To select particular messages out of a group of messages, click once on the first message. Then, while holding down the Ctrl key (in Windows) or the Command or "Apple" key (on a Macintosh), click on each of the other messages you want to select.

     

3. Now position your cursor over one of the messages you selected, then click on that message and hold the mouse button down. While holding the mouse button down, drag the cursor over the mail folder where you want to move the messages until that mail folder is highlighted.

   

4. Release the mouse button. The messages you selected will then be copied or moved (depending on your e-mail client) to the new mail folder. To verify this, simply double-click on the new mail folder to view the messages in the folder.

Simply repeat this process as many times as needed in order to relocate all of the e-mail you want to keep into your Mail@umd account or into your local mail folders.

Please note that the method described above is only one method of moving e-mail messages from one folder to another. Your e-mail client may provide other alternative methods for moving e-mail and will likely describe these alternatives in its Help files.

Step 5: Removing Your Old Account From Your E-Mail Client

Once you are sure you have relocated all of the e-mail you want to keep from your old account, the next step is to remove the old account from your e-mail client. Removing your old account from your client will not affect your old e-mail account--it simply means that your e-mail client will no longer connect to it.

In many of the e-mail clients for Windows, you can remove the account by simply right-clicking (clicking on the right mouse button instead of the left) on the mailbox for the old e-mail account and choosing the remove or delete option in the menu that appears. Once again, using Outlook Express as an example:

You will have to remove the old account through the Preferences settings for your e-mail client because most Macintosh e-mail clients do not make use of the right-mouse button. If you cannot find the Preferences, consult the Help files for your e-mail client.

Step 6: The End

At this point, you should be finished relocating the e-mail you want to keep to either folders in Mail@umd or to local mail folders located either on your hard drive or a network drive.

As mentioned earlier, e-mail that you transferred to your local mail folders will only be available to you when you are using that particular computer. This also means that if something unexpected should happen to that computer, the e-mail in the local folders could potentially be lost. If you feel that you cannot risk losing this e-mail, consult the Help files for your e-mail client and your local computer technical support (if you have any) to find out what your options are for backing up or archiving those e-mail messages.