Outlook 2000 - lost in the land of...

I am attempting to transition from Outlook Express v6 to Outlook 2000. Initially I used the migration wizard tool that is supplied with Office 2000 (small business edition) to perform the setup and conversion of the address book and existing folders and emails, and it worked fine for the main default account.

Problem is, I have five accounts set up under the "old" Outlook Express and the migration tool only converted the main account, so subsequently I set up the other four accounts in Outlook.

Now, OE has a "switch identity" function under "file" to determine which email account that you want to work with -- Outlook does NOT appear to have that capability(?), and in fact now that I have set up the other 4 accounts, when Outlook automatically reads email, it reads all five accounts into the one inbox. Of course, under OE I have differing special folders set up for each of the five accounts, and for good reason want to keep it that way to reduce clutter, and work with one email account at a time...

Now, going from the theoretically simplistic Outlook Express to the supposedly more sophisiticated and flexible Outlook I expect to at least have the same basic capabilities, instead of less flexible capabilities, and I realize that there are more options, settings, and tweaks of differing terminology in Outlook, but I have been unable to find anything that will allow me to get back to working with my five email accounts seperately, and there is nothing in Outlook help about identities or switching. There was one thing that I am wondering about ( ".pst" files?), but first I am going to stop at this point to post to see if anyone knows the magic hidden secret to the equivalent of the OE "identities" concept in Outlook...?

thanx, jb

 

Well, thought I would jump back in and answer my own post, as I seem to have worked out what must be "the solution" before anyone responded -- it just took me a while to see through my habitual OE blinders to what must be the Outlook concept of doing things, and now maybe this info might subsequently help someone trying to accomplish the same transition...

I never did find a way to "switch identities" between my five email accounts in O2k, it just does not seem to be a feature in my version, but may have somehow missed it.

So, what I did that started out to be a temporary workaround, was after I had set up the four other accounts in addition to the main default account,

I then, I added 4 folders named inboxXXX to serve as inboxes for the other four accounts, and set up rules to intercept emails with those addresses and route them to the respective inboxes...

Next (with the initial conversion of the main account already accomplished of course and with both OE and O2k started) repeat the process of switching identities in OE to each of the four accounts, and then selecting the file/import option in O2k, check "email" and whatever, and it will automatically bring the remaining pre-existing OE data into O2k for each of the accounts. You will need to arrange the additional folders to your liking (in O2k, I added a primary bogus folder for each of the five accounts and moved the converted OE folders, now O2k folders, under them such that they were collapsible/expandable and therefore compactly displayed when not needed.

A little messy the first time to get it all set up, but after that, O2k reads and distributes everything into the folders for you, then instead of having to switch identities, you have it all there in one interface and just click on whatever accounts folders you want to work with (and somebodies gonna ask why have five accounts -- well I guess it is better if you have five specific categories of emails to deal with and they are not all in one inbox and one set of folders, but are instead distributed according based on the account...). And here I was groaning because I could not figure out how to "switch identities" - sometimes you just don't know what you've got til you sit back and figure out how to make it work better than what you had...

But a real plus to all this, that I have to point as as an additional TIP OF THE DAY, is that there is some great freeware available NOW called "Desktop Sidebar ", supposedly the concept that will be featured in a future release of windows ( "Longhorn "?), and I have hooked it up with Outlook and it's great, the combo is SO much better than plain old OE6, I feel like I have emerged from the email "dark ages" -- saves a lot of time and frustration. However, Desktop Sidebar only works with the combo of XP or Win2k and Outlook. And, note that I could not get Outlook 2000 SP3 to work with NIS -- had to disable it and eventually uninstall it, along with NAV (hallelueh!), which was the subject of another reply post to another thread in this forum...

Sorry admins, if I duplicated some info here, but was hard to get around it, and I felt it was worthwhile...

 

I don't know if you have figured it out yet or not keywester, but if you are looking to send email from one of your 5 email addresses (thus switching identities ) you can do that by clicking on the "Options" button in the toolbar. A box will open up that will give you several message, delivery, and tracking options; the "send message using" option has a dropdown box which will allow you to choose which identity to use to send the message.

And yes, I have several email addresses myself - all for different purposes - and it makes a great deal of sense to me to have them. You are not alone!