Read emails in plain text without Outlook

My dad recently got a new laptop to replace his five year old beast. On that five year old beast is thousands upon thousands of very important business emails and legal documents. Naturally, he needs to have access to these emails.

Due to his concerns about getting his new laptop up and running, I didn't get to do the logical thing and transfer his old emails and settings over to his new laptop before he started using it. Now, it's been over a month and his new laptop is quickly accumulating new piles of vital emails.

I need to find a way for him to read his old emails quickly and easily.

He uses Microsoft Outlook. I've got the original computer with all the emails on it as well as his new computer. Can I import his old email into Outlook on his new computer without losing any of his new email or overwriting his new settings? Failing that, is there a way for me to view his emails, as saved by Outlook in .dbx files, in plain text?

Note: this isn't a situation where I can just try something and hope it works. My dad's a lawyer and losing a single email can be roughly equivalent to the end of the world. So I'm not going to do anything experimental like trying to import his old emails just to see if it works unless someone knows for sure that it will.

 

Is that outlook express or outlook?

Either one, you could burn those to a cd and import them using the import option built into outlook. It would just import the email, not overwrite any of his current email.

 

This program looks great. Thanks for the recommendation. It's definitely worth the $5. Do you know how it handles attachments? That may be an issue I hadn't really thought about until right now.

Do you know what this would do with regards to folders? Would it overwrite any folders he's created? Would it automatically create new ones? Also, have you tried doing this? Clearly importing the emails would be the easiest, and by far the best, option. However, I need to make absolutely sure that nothing gets lost or messed up in the process.

 

My dad suggested forwarding all the emails to him. It just seems a bit impractical, to me, to forward him tens of thousands of emails accounting for over 3GB of space on his hard drive, just so he can resort all the resent messages back into the appropriate folders. It's amazing that 5 years ago my dad didn't even use email and today he pretty much runs his entire practice with it.

I emailed the guy who created the program to ask him about attachments. He said that the attachment is saved as part of the email, and that if the program can recover the email it will also be able to recover the attachment.

Which kind of leads to something else he pointed out. DBXpress(which seems to have superseded DBXtract) is meant as a recovery program for corrupt dbx files. He's got another program called OEX which is head and shoulders above those two. OEX basically just takes the place of Outlook and allows you to manage your messages from within the program. Take a look and see. For $20 and no risk of losing any messages, this is definitely the way I'm going to go.

Thanks a ton for your help

 

I do this all the time. I don't use any snazzy programs for automation for email. You can always make a backup of the current email. It will not overwrite, it will import.

Though, I still like to know is this OUTLOOK or OUTLOOK EXPRESS.

 

Outlook Express on the old laptop (though the emails can be easily imported into Outlook) and Outlook on the new.