Importing mails to Hotmail

[suklee]

Usually people ask the question "how to download hotmails onto their computers with outlook express"... but my problem is that I want to do the opposite. With Hotmail's impending move to 250MB free storage, I'd like to move the thousands of mails that I had collected over the years back into Hotmail.

Can it be done? If so, how?

 

[MrChad]

Forward them to your hotmail email address?

 

[suklee]

but then they'd all be dated June 25, 2004 yeah?

I want a way to *move* all the mails back into Hotmail so that the dates remain intact...

 

[episodic]

I don't believe it is possible the way you want. . .

Best I could think of would be to sort your mails by date locally, and forward them in that order. They will all still be dated the day you sent them, but the exact times will be different, so you will still be able to sort by date on hotmail, and the message you forwarded first will be your oldest - just make sure to forward your oldes message down to your least oldest. . .

Hope I made sense. .

 

[suklee]

Thanks episodic, that made sense... but I'd still lose my original dates 🙁

Hmm, is this a plausible scenario? Since Hotmail can download from POP servers... if I can somehow move my mails onto, say, my own pop3 server... maybe then I could download them back into Hotmail with all original dates intact...

 

[episodic]

You are not going to be able to get the mails on a pop server without date altering either. . .

 

[suklee]

bump

 

[suklee]

in this not possible? one last try...

 

[MrChad]

Ok, I think it can be done.

I have my hotmail account setup in Outlook. If I go to File / Connect to Hotmail, I can drag and drop emails from my local Inbox to my Hotmail Inbox. The datetime stamps of the emails appear to be preserved. Please note, this process is slow.

Good luck.

 

[suklee]

Chad, many thanks for your suggestion. You've pointed me in the right direction. I've just tried, as a test, moving 5 emails from my Inbox back into Hotmail. (Note that my mails are currently in Outlook Express, and not Outlook)

The results look good, but there is one problem: when viewing the mails in hotmail thru internet explorer, the date is displayed as JUN 27 only in the table of contents... when I click to open the mail, it shows the original time/datestamp! 😕

the original datetime stamps of the mails when looking at my account through OE are preserved.

Chad, would you mind verifying what dates are displayed when you view your mails through IE? (in the Table of contents)

 

[MrChad]

Yeah, it looks like moving them through Outlook has the same problem. In Outlook, the date shows up as June 21, but in IE, it shows up as June 27 in the table of contents.

Weird.