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With the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2.0 software for the first iPhone generation and the iPod touch Apple also introduced Microsoft Exchange support.

For a client like Outlook, but also e.g. for my Nokia E61, Zimbra Server will look like and behave lika an Exchange. That means you can simply point Mobile.me (me.com) or your iPhone/iPod at your Zimbra mail server and done. You get mail, calendar and contacts push over the air. Note: Make sure you diable your IMAP account for the same server should you have one, otherwise you might confuse yourself…

Even with Office running quite well on Leopard through VMware Fusion most of you switchers will still not want to depend on the messaging solution from Microsoft on your Cupertino OS. But how would the required migration work for all the emails from the past? There is no export feature in Outlook that would create anything meaningful to Apple Mail. Obviously for pure IMAP (or Zimbra connector) users as I am, it is no issue, as you just point your new client towards the right ports of your server and off you go. But I’m also an offline user as a POP3 user would be when it comes to mail archives. My thousands of received but also sent messages are nicely archived in separate local folders in Outlook format for each of the past years.

The answer to the Outlook to Mail migration question is: Thunderbird.

Simply install Thunderbird on your Windows environment next to Outlook and agree to all import from Outlook suggestions you will get during setup. Thunderbird will store online as well as offline content in the local application data folder in your home directory.

C:\Documents and Settings\[USER]\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\[PROFILE]\Mail\..

The .msf and the corresponding files that do not have an ending are what you need to move over to your Mac. Mail.app has an “Import Mailboxes…” feature that you can use to include them into your local mail.app setup.

During my own migration I realized that not all files (each representing one folder from Outlook) were offered for import. This seems to be file size related. The solution here is to split them into items below 1 GB in Thunderbird before moving them over to the Mac. Note, if you split e.g. a 1.2GB file into two 600MB files you have to compact them before moving, otherwise the file size doesn’t change.

This way I successfully migrated 18′972 emails from Microsoft Outlook on Windows to Apple Mail on OS X Leopard. All available at the tip of my finger through spotlight of course.

Albeit all the preaching we do and all the common sense you think people would/should apply, Outlook is today the most popular e-mail tool in the world. And some Frisco based guys think that the program is so poorly suited for most people’s intensive e-mail habits that they have founded a company, Xobni, intended to fix it.

Xobni (“inbox” spelled backwards) has produced free software that indexes all Outlook e-mail and makes messages quickly and easily searchable.

You might think Google Desktop would do the same for you (does for me for years now), but Xobni, which its creators call an “intelligent filter,” adds a few more features. When it scours the inbox, it extracts phone numbers it thinks are associated with the sender. So when a user searches for a person, Xobni presents the number in a side panel. The software also interprets the social relationships between people who are sending messages to each other by interpreting the to: and cc: headers of each message.

In addition, the data collected are visualized during normal action per user or per object, and can also be analyzed in details through Xobni Analytics. Interesting stats like most frequent mailer or mailee, fastest responder, mails per timeframe etc. can be easily and in a Google Analytics type way be retrieved for whatever purpose you might have.

The company raised $4 million from the investment funds of Vinod Khosla, a Sun Microsystems co-founder, and Niklas Zennstrom, one of the creators of Skype. In February, Bill Gates demonstrated the program at Microsoft’s San Jose developers’ conference and called it “the next generation in social networking.”

The idea is to sell the tools to companies later in time and Xobni now has ambitions that extend well beyond Microsoft Outlooktowards the popular Web-based services Yahoo Mail, Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Hotmail as well as social networks like Facebook and Linkedin. Apple Mail is also on the list.

While discussing Xobni I was also pointed out to ClearContext, which seems to do similar things. Did not try it though.