Export AOL Desktop Mail

[SubstreamAI]

I have decided to go with an email client for viewing and sending email as opposed to using web interfaces. I keep an aol account (free) around simply because I've had it so long and I don't want to lose access to old friends who are accustom to reaching me with that account. More importantly, I can't find a way to save all my old mail without it.

There are plenty of commercial tools for exporting the mail contained in a PFC (Personal Filing Cabinet, ver 9.x and below). I've even found a freeware tool for doing it (Goodbye_A*L). But what about AOLs latest "You'll never be able to leave us" format, the *.cls email container for AOL Desktop?

If I could get my locally saved mail ("On My PC" mail folders) to move to my online saved mail ("On AOL" mail folders), then I could download the messages via my IMAP configured email client which works with AOL Anywhere pretty well. However, AOL seems to have anticipated this and will not allow you to move the mail (so far as I know).

Is there a way to get mail out of AOL's wonderful new CLS files and into a more transferrable format? If not, does anyone want to take a stab at a MUCH Needed utility for doing this?

"Please help Obie Wan, you are my only hope..."

[vinnyT]

Depends on how much mail there is of course, but couldn't you just send/forward the email to yourself and then download/open it in your new email client (i.e. thunderbird)?

[SubstreamAI]

There is quite a bit of it, thousands. However, I could forward the most important email only. The biggest problem with this is that I will not be able to locate email by date as everything will arrive today. So if for example, I need to figure out something that happened with my lawyer back in February of last year, I want to be able to sort the messages by date and quickly grab all of the appropriate correspondence. If I forward everything today, I won't be able to find that email by date and I will have to do a text search which may or may not hit all the email I need.

Ideally, anyone wanting to migrate from AOL will want to keep their email as it is. You can do this with almost any other email provider (AOL is a content provider, not an ISP). The world needs a way to do this...

Doesn't anyone know how to do this?