Transferring Account Settings and Saved E-Mails with Windows Live Mail

I recently formatted my hard drive to do a clean install of Windows (and possibly Ubuntu at some point) and one of the things that I had to take care of was to transfer my e-mail accounts and my saved e-mails back to Windows Live Mail after installation. Luckily, Windows Live Mail has export and import functions to easily transfer account settings and mails for this purpose. Here's a step by step explanation for importing and exporting e-mails in Windows Live Mail:

Saving (exporting) e-mails:

• Click the blue tab in the upper left corner:



• Select the "Export email" tab from the menu:



• Choose the "E-mail messages" option:



• Choose the "Microsoft Windows Live Mail" format and click "Next":



• In the next window, input the directory that you want to store your e-mails:



• Select the folders that you want to save or simply select the "All folders" option:



• Windows Live Mail will start saving your e-mails. It can take quite a while if you have a lot of e-mails to be saved:



• When this operation is completed, your e-mails will be saved to the folder you chose in the previous steps. You can then move those files to your external hard drive or wherever it is that you want to store them:

Restoring (importing) e-mails:

• Click the blue tab in the upper left corner:



• Select the "Import messages" tab from the menu:



• Windows Live Mail will ask you which format the e-mails should be imported. Choose the "Windows Live Mail" option:



• In the next window, enter the location where the e-mails are located:



• Select the folders which you want to import or simply choose "All folders":



• Windows Live Mail will begin importing the e-mails. It can take quite a while if you are importing a large number of e-mails:



• Your newly imported e-mails will be placed in the "Imported Folder" under the "Storage Folders" section. You can then move the e-mails back to your inbox if you prefer:

In addition to the messages, account settings can also be exported and imported using Windows Live Mail. By using this feature, e-mail server addresses, ports, usernames and other information can automatically be transferred. For those of us with just a few e-mail accounts it may not be that significant but as the number of e-mail accounts increases, it becomes a hassle to enter account information for each of those accounts by hand. Here are the step by step instructions for importing and exporting account settings:

Saving (exporting) account settings:

• Click the blue tab in the upper left corner:



• Select the "Export email" tab from the menu:



• Choose the "Account" option:

• In the next dialogue, choose the account whose settings you would like to export and click the "Export" button:



• Give a name to the file which will keep the account settings and choose a location for this file:

Restoring (importing) account settings:

• Click the blue tab in the upper left corner:



• Select the "Options" tab from the menu:



• Choose the "Email accounts" option:



• You will see the list of your current accounts in the next dialogue. Click the "Import" button on the lower right:

• Next, choose the file where you saved your account settings and it will be added to your list of e-mail accounts:

In my case, when I tried importing e-mail account settings that I saved prior to formatting the drive, I get an error that reads "The import did not complete because an error occurred.". No matter how much I searched about what causes this error and how to solve it, I couldn't find anything. It is possible that this is an issue of compatibility between different versions of Windows Live Mail. The only solution I could find was to use some web service such as "Online IAF decoder" and enter all the settings decoded by this website by hand.