How to import Outlook emails stored in CSV format?

[glricht]

We have a medium-sized law office that currently uses Time Matters (TM) (ver 14) to manage their practice. The server gets the email (using POP) and stores it in the application using a proprietary format. The server also maintains a Calendar, To-Do lists and Contacts -- again, stored in their proprietary format.

We're trying to migrate them to Outlook 2010 (part of a migration to O365) and are trying to export the data from the above four areas into a PST. As it turns out, TM can export the Calendar entries, To-Do list entries and the Contacts directly into a PST! And testing has shown it works fine.

But -- TM only exports the emails to a CSV file! I've been successful in doing the export and can open the CSV file manually or using Excel, but running into problems in how to import them into the "inbox" (or some such folder).

1. Outlook supports importing a CSV file, and you have to map the CSV fields into to the email fields, but none of the email bodies have come across, nor do the date/time of the email, and a bunch of other fields are also missing. (I've tried different mappings, but it hasn't made a difference.)

2. There are some 3rd-party programs that will import MSG, EML and MHT files directly into an Outlook PST, but I'm having a problem finding a program that will convert a CSV file into one of the above formats.

I don't want to have to spend the time to write a program to the step 2 conversion, but my options are beginning to look a little bleak.

Anybody have some suggestions?

 

[altrenda]

You're in for a bit of work. I did something like this a long time ago, and don't want to do it again.

The info is a bit old, but they recommend using Excel as an intermediate step. And to do what you wanted to avoid, write some of your own code.

From this site http://www.outlookcode.com/article.aspx?ID=23

"It comes as a big shock to many people that you cannot use Outlook's built-in Import and Export wizard to handle data in custom forms. User-defined fields simply do not appear on the data mapping grid in the wizard. Furthermore, if you try to export from items that were created with custom forms, you don't even get the built-in Outlook fields -- you get no data at all."

With a lot of firms leaving Time Matters, it would seem someone out there has done this before or specializes in it, but I couldn't find them.

 

[FremontPC]

Try out Emailchemy to see if it imports correctly. Sounds like the CSV import in Excel / Outlook is tripping over special characters and interpreting them as the end of the record. If Emailchemy can handle Time Matters .csv output, then you connect Emailchemy's local IMAP server to Outlook, then drag and drop. Of course, the screwup could be in TM's export...

I ran into this type of issue going from Outlook 2011 Mac to Outlook 2010 PC. The PC import filters just can't handle the rich text that's allowed on the Mac side. Contacts were a special pain to process, everything beyond plain text caused Outlook to spawn a new record. What a mess.