Pariah Burke Consulting & Training with Creative & Publishing Workflow Expert Pariah S. Burke | Informing & Empowering Creative Professionals™

During a recent migra­tion from a Windows XP com­puter to a new sys­tem run­ning Windows 7 x64, I was dis­mayed to think that I had to man­u­ally rebuild all 14 of my Outlook e-mail accounts, their user­names and pass­words, incom­ing and out­go­ing server data, and so on. After a while search­ing around, I found this extremely easy solu­tion on the Microsoft Communities forums. I’m re-posting it here to make it eas­ier for oth­ers to find. The solu­tion worked per­fectly for me. Hopefully it will help you, too.

I for­got to say it on the pre­vi­ous post: it is pos­si­ble to export the
Outlook Email Accounts direct from the Registry and import it back on the
other instal­la­tion. To do this open the Regedit and go to:
[HKEY_USERSS-1–5-21-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxSoftwareMicrosoftWindows NTCurrentVersionWindows Messaging SubsystemProfilesOutlook

Note: “S-1–5-21-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxxx-xxxx” is your GUID, which will
dif­fer for each installation.

Edit or delete entries as you need, then export the entire key to a file and
import it into your new installation!

If you use this method to move the set­tings to another PC, make sure you do
a search and replace on the xxxxx as your GUID will be different.

It’s usu­ally a good idea to back up the exist­ing key on the new PC before
delet­ing it. Remember to always make a reg­istry backup first and just be
care­ful in there!

It works for me all the time. My “FULL backup pro­ce­dure” is simple:

1) Save the PST file (which is your Post Office file, con­tain­ing all the
e-mails, cal­en­dar, address book, etc)
2) Export your RULES
3) Export the afore­men­tioned Registry Key

To import it on another instal­la­tion is sim­ple (just a few more steps):

1) Open Outlook at least ONCE, and DO NOT cre­ate an e-mail account a this
time. Just fol­low the start up screens until it is done.
2) Find out the loca­tion of your PST file (go to TOOLS -> ACCOUNT SETTINGS
-> DATA FILES). Take a note of the PST file loca­tion.
3) Close Outlook (don’t min­i­mize, CLOSE IT).
4) Go to the folder where the PST file is located and DELETE IT, replac­ing
it by your own backup copy
5) Open the REGEDIT and import the KEY with your email accounts set­tings
(make sure you have changed the GUID on the backup file as explained above)
6) Open Outlook again. Don’t be scared if it gives you an error mes­sage.
Just ignore it and close the mes­sage win­dow. Outlook will open with all your
e-mails and accounts already restored.
7) Import the RULES back (TOOLS -> RULES AND ALERTS -> OPTIONS -> IMPORT
RULES). Note that you may have to “adjust” some rules in very rare cases. In
most cases you just need to re-enable them.
8) As your PST file uses “direct access” to link some “short­cuts”, the
Address Book link will prob­a­bly be lost (but all the addresses you have are
still there). To fix it just delete the EMPTY address book on the tree and
link yours using the address book tool to fix the short­cuts (TOOLS -> ADDRESS
BOOK).

It is pretty much sim­ple this pro­ce­dure and it may takes 15 min­utes only of
your time (a lot less than develop a solu­tion for that).

I’ve been think­ing myself to cre­ate an auto­mated tool for the task, but as
I’ve said: it is so fast to do it by hand (and fail­ure free) that doesn’t
make sense on my case to develop a tool for the task. However, I’d love to
see some­one else doing the job (maybe YOU, Galen?). If some­one wants to
develop a tool I’d like to help. Just drop me a line and I can pro­vide lots
of infor­ma­tion about Outlook tricks…

Hope this post have helped some­one else.

– Wolf