Redirecting your incoming email
From your Control Panel, select the Mail applet. From the Mail dialog, click Email Accounts. The dialog shown in Figure I will appear.

FIGURE I

This is where you change your email delivery location. Click picture for a larger image.

If you closely examine the lower, left corner of the dialog, you'll see a drop-down menu with the title "Deliver new email to the following location". This little menu controls which Personal Folders PST file is used for email delivery. It can also be very confusing, since both Personal Folders files are named the same.

In most cases, the top Personal Folders is your original. The bottom is your new one. Select the bottom Personal Folders file.

Cleaning up
Finally, it's time to clean up the rest of your conversion. First, go back to Outlook and select Data File Management from the Outlook 2003 File menu. This time, you'll want to hit the Remove button. Go ahead and remove the PST file that's in Documents and Settings. This doesn't delete the file, it just takes it out of Outlook's consideration.

Finally, you may need to futz with your reminders, rules, and other incidentals in Outlook. Most things will move over properly, but you're bound to have a few glitches. Clean them up as they occur and you'll have a larger capacity PST file.

Oh, and I'm betting you're thinking it'd be a lot easier if there was a simple convert file option somewhere. Yeah, it would be easier, wouldn't it? Let's hope Microsoft adds that in Office 2007.

For more than 20 years, David Gewirtz, the author of Where Have All The Emails Gone? and The Flexible Enterprise, has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com.