Help: Converting Outlook 2003 to XP

[MysticMooseBB]

For consistency’s sake, my boss decided to downgrade the users who have Office 2003 to Office XP. This is a pretty easy step as most of you know, however, Outlook seems to a large pain. The common backup procedure for Outlook is to save everything to a Personal Folder File (.pst), but Outlook XP cannot read Outlook 2003's .pst.

I should note, you can save Outlook 2003's contacts as a comma separated value (windows) file, and that imports into XP easily. And it appears you can backup their e-mails in the same format, but you lose the attachments. (Attachments are important)

Our first solution was to create folders representing the e-mail organization that the user used. (Inbox, Sent Items, Family, etc). Then just copy all the e-mails to each folder and manually dump them back into Outlook XP after creating folders. This worked flawlessly on the first machine, but the second machine had many issues. Outlook would not let anyone copy e-mails (message files) to the inbox/sent items/other folders.

The next solution we took was the long and painful one. I began by forwarding every e-mail to herself. Sending about 30 e-mails as attachments per message, then sorting them as I expanded the attachment. With the users over 1500 e-mails collectively, this took a lot of time and I'm sure the webmail server was having a heart-attack.

I am wondering if anyone has done the 2003 - XP downgrade and found a simple solution for backing up a user's email.

We are using Office XP with SP3

Thanks,
Moose