Mail dates

[TheHappyLime]

Hi,

An old family member of mine changed out his computer. He was using windows live mail and mails where kept offline. 

However efter migrating to a new pc he wants all the mails to be transfered and shared between his iphone, ipad etc. 

In the store they migrated all his mails from him. However they now all have the date of the migration, not the day they where recieved or send. 
If you click on an mail and open it offline it still has the "information" of the original dates. 

Any idea how to solve this? 


Regards 

[Nord]

Whether this is even possible depends on the mail program used, the mail provider, what software they use/support to transfer mails and how the migration process was being handled to begin with.

From what I know such “services”  are usually not available for free mails but I could be wrong.

 

Unless by “stored offline” you men having the mails just copy pasted into some folder in windows, in that case windows will always use the date on which the file was created, so on a new PC the date they got put in the folder.
Could be “fixed” by just putting the drive from his old PC into the new one aswell and keep saving up mails on there or copying the files directly from the old HDD onto the new computer via drag & drop, this way windows usually keeps the initial creation date.

[TheHappyLime]

Hi, thank you for replying. 

 

It is a paid service provider (mail services). The mails where categorized by winodws live mail. WLM uses a "special" sort of indexing apparently, since after upgrading to win10. "mail" no longer recognizes the mails, neither will it import them. It can access them individually by clicking on them on the drive. How ever they are all named like "40cc930E829". 

Some of the mails was imported correctly and has correct dates. However 90% are with the created dates.

[Nord]

Are you using the mail program that comes with Windows pre installed?
Because if you do, you can be fairly certain that it is garbage and that you should not use it. Try thunderbird, it is usually straightforward on how to import mails and they apparently support windows live imports fully:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/switching-thunderbird#w_switching-from-windows-mail-or-windows-live-mail-to-thunderbird

As it sounds like your family member will need to get used to a new mail program anyway, might as well make it a proper one.

 

Most likely outlook would also be able to import the mails, as I dont think microsoft would be so incompetent to not setup a porper import function for a discontinued program on one of theire other programs, but then again, maybe they are. Plus its not free.

 

Also if it's a paid email provider, it's a fair assumption that the mails are stored online or are backed by the provider which could be useful in restoring the emails with dates by syncing them from the server, then moving them out manually and afterwards deleting them off the server if one is so inclined.
Also this way one knows for sure if the provider keeps backups or not and can act accordingly.

[TheHappyLime]

Ill try my way around with thunderbird tomorrow. 
Hoping that it works. 

Well he's 89 years old, so anything to complicated mail software is not very usefull.