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Learn How to Export SquirrelMail To Outlook – Quick Tips

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Written By Andrew Jackson
Anuraag Singh
Approved By Anuraag Singh
Published On August 25th, 2022
Reading Time 5 Minutes Reading

SquirrelMail is a webmail-client that provides an interface to a particular organization’s email system using the web. It allows remote access to emails and sends/receives email messages whenever users are absent from their computer. It incorporates all the functionality users expect from an email client, including powerful support for the address book, attachments, calendar, and folders. In addition, SquirrelMail is a highly customizable webmail service and system administrators can install, write as well as share “plugins” at the SquirrelMail server to extend the functionality to meet organizations’ requirements. Unfortunately, SquirrelMail is being removed.

In this post, we will the discuss most promising methods to convert SquirrelMail To Outlook

We’re sure you’re wondering WHY?

SquirrelMail was developed and maintained by an open-source project that over time gradually loses its contributors and developers. The last SquirrelMail update came on May 30, 2013, and the last release came on July 12, 2011. However, webmail users now expect a better user experience, instead of providing an unsecured and unmanaged application. Thus, cPanel has chosen to delete SquirrelMail and this is the reason why users want to convert SquirrelMail to Outlook as it uses end-to-end encryption to protect business email and other databases.

But, the main problem is how to move data from SquirrelMail to Outlook, and while scanning forums we found so many users are bothered with the same issue. Here is one typical case we have taken from a forum website:

Recently, we have received a bunch of files and folders that were directly copied from a SquirrelMail server. We do not use the SquirrelMail application in our organization and also do not want to try or set up a new server just for manipulating these files. These data files seem simple HTML webmail files that can be drag and drop into Firefox and open. But, another client who projects this is want to import files into the Outlook application. Is there any magical undocumented method to export emails from SquirrelMail to Outlook? We’d like to retain the email subjects and mail headers if at all possible.

Migrate From SquirrelMail to Outlook 2016

SquirrelMail does not provide an option to directly migrate its emails to any other email client like MS Outlook. But, this can be done indirectly as one can export emails from this application and then, import the downloaded emails to Outlook. Hence, the complete procedure is categorized into three major steps:

Phase 1: Export SquirrelMail Emails to Local Machine

  1. If you are Admin then, you can directly download your emails from the server via cPanel
  2. If you are a normal user then, select all the email messages you want to export from SquirrelMail
  3. After that, hit the Move button that is next to Forward
  4. Now, Create a new folder and give it a name. Click Archive
  5. You will get a prompt that asks to open or save the file. Choose Save File option so that the file will be saved in the browser’s download location
  6. Once after unzipping the downloaded file, you will find that all your emails are downloaded in Maildir file format

Phase 2: Convert Downloaded SquirrelMail Files to PST Format

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  • Select the folder that contains Maildir files and click Export
choose export
  • From the Export Option wizard, choose PST file format
choose pst
  • Hit the Browse button to choose a destination location for the resultant file and select a location. Click OK
set destination
  • Hit Adv. Settings button if you want to split the output PST into multiple small parts or want to export the data of selected time period. Save the changes
save advanced settings
  • After this, hit the Export button and your file will start converting. Let the process completed successfully
export squirrelmail to pst
  • Once its done, navigate to the destination location and you will find that your file is converted into PST file format
pst files

Phase 3: Import Resultant File to Outlook Application

In order to add SquirrelMail to Outlook (access emails), you need to import the output file in Outlook. Below is how to do this:

  • Launch Outlook and click on the File tab
  • Choose Open & Export >> Import/Export
open and export in outlook
  • In Import/Export wizard, select Import from another program or file option and click Next
import from file
  • Select Outlook Data File (.pst) option and click Next
  • Browse the output .pst file that you want to import. Hit the Next button
  • After all this, navigate back to your MS Outlook and access your SquirrelMail emails from here.
display emails
Additional Solution: SquirrelMail uses IMAP protocol so, you can also configure your SquirrelMail webmail account in Outlook. You can do this automatically as SquirrelMail offers ‘Auto Discovery’ feature for automatic account setup in any other email application.

Observational Verdict

Migrating data from one platform to another is a common task today and most of the users are inclining towards easy-to-operate and highly-secure environments. In this article, we have discussed one such data migration i.e., convert SquirrelMail to Outlook. Here, we have disclosed all the possible solutions to execute this operation in a simple manner.

  author

By Andrew Jackson

I am SQL DBA and SQL Server blogger too. I like to share about SQL Server and the problems related to it as well as their solution and also I do handle database related user queries, server or database maintenance, database management, etc. I love to share my knowledge with SQL Geeks.