How to Migrate Outlook Emails to Office 365 Account ?

Updated On - December 18, 2023 by Armaan | Reading Time: 6 minutes

Office 365, being cloud-based software as a service, is attracting users by providing a one-stop solution. For email handling and all other needs of organizations, Office 365 offers multiple services with subscription-based –plans. Migrating personal or professional email to Office 365 from any email client allows you to access email from any device connected to the Internet. Office 365, aka Microsoft 365, provides scalability, all-time accessibility, and cost-efficiency to your emailing. Office 365 also has many services that enhance the productivity of your email. Outlook is one of the prominent email clients when talking about email clients. In recent market trends, we can easily find that most users want to migrate Outlook emails to Office 365 accounts.

And for this migration, everyone searches for a guided solution, which you will get in this write–up. Outlook has an Export/Import option to export your email to an external PST file. Later, you can import this PST file into Outlook or Office 365 account again. Still, this manual method doesn’t provide a satisfactory result for the professionals’ needs; we will know this in this blog.

Reasons to Migrate Outlook Emails to Office 365 Account:

• One-Stop Solution: Office 365 offers a one-stop solution to users, enhancing professionals’ productivity. Users get user-centric services like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Sway, SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, etc..
• No Downtime; Always Up to date: With Office 365, there is no issue like server downtime while upgrading the version. Office 365 always remains updated; hence no scenario of old and latest versions.
• Conversion of email accounts:  When you use an email like Yahoo (test…@yahoo.com) or AOL (test…@aol.com), you want to change a new email account like test…@contoso.com. Although you can create a new test in the …@contoso.com Outlook app, it will not have an email from the old account.
• Change of P.C. to P.C.: When you change your computer from old to new, you need to reinstall Outlook. In this case, you want your old emails as well. So you need to export your email to the PST file and import the PST file to that new computer. But, with Office 365, you can access your data of all kinds from anywhere.
• Periodic Backups: Large inbox backups reduce the size of the entire mailbox, and periodic backups increase data security. After downloading the data backup in the PST file, you need to save the file to any external location, such as another computer or USB drive. The Outlook Migration process requires you to move your email to an external PST file and then import the PST file into another Outlook program with an Office 365 account.
• Convenient Subscription-Based Plans: Office 365 has multiple user-centric plans that fulfil users’ needs. There is no need to set up any hardware or physical machinery. You just have to choose a suitable plan. Plans are suitable for all end-users, from student plans to enterprise plans.

Way to Migrate Outlook Emails to Office 365 Account:

Here, firstly we will know about the steps of manual migration using Outlook later other dimensions of this way are also explained.

1st Step: Migrate Outlook Emails to PST

1. Firstly go to the top of your Outlook ribbon, and click File.
2. Choose Open & Export > Import/Export.
3. In “Import and Export Wizard” choose ‘Export to a file’ option and Click Next.
4. Select the Outlook Data File (PST)and click Next.
5. Select an email account to export. Make sure you check ‘Include Subfolders’ to get everything out of the account. Select Contacts, Calendar, Boxes, and Magazine, and click Next
6. Click the Browse button to select the location of the PST file where the file will be saved. Click the ‘OK’ button to proceed further.
7. If you want to export data to an existing PST file, click Options and specify what to do when exporting data already exists.
8. After that, click Finish.
9. Outlook starts with the export process.

NOTE: When you run the export process, if you choose a password-protected option, it increases the security of your personal PST file; meanwhile, in most cases, you have to choose to place the password in the PST files.

Once you export the mailbox data into a PST file, you will still be required to go to Outlook and upload PST file into Office 365 account mailbox.

2nd Step: Import Outlook PST to Office 365

• Click the File tab, Open & Export, and select Import/Export.
• Import and Export wizard will appear on the screen.
• Choose ‘Import from another program or file’, then click Next.
• Now choose Outlook Data File (PST) and click Next.
• Browse the PST file that you had exported earlier, and then under the Options, there are three options –

1. Replicate duplicates with items imported.
2. Allow duplicates to be created.
3. Do not import duplicates.

• Select the option among the three and click Next.
• If you specify a password in the PST file, you must enter the password and click OK.
• Choose the Import items to the same folder in the option, select the Microsoft 365 mailbox, and click Finish.
• Outlook will start importing PST file content into Office 365 mailbox. Later, you can open all the contents of the mailbox.

Things you should know before moving with this manual way?

As we know, emails contain crucial data; hence we should be extra conscious. Before going with the above-explained manual way using Outlook, it would be better to explore its dark sides. In other words, we can say besides having the advantage of being a freeway, this method has some limitations too. Let’s have a look:

• You need to execute the task repeatedly if you have a large amount of data or numerous PST files to migrate into your Office 365 account.  In other words, we can say this method doesn’t permit to migrate Outlook emails to Office 365 account in a multiple manner.
• Migration of every PST file one by one consumes a lot of time, and professionals do not have that time.
• As the manual includes multiple technically enriched steps, you should be technically sound to execute these tasks error less.
• Users do not get advanced options like customizing migration data using the advanced option.

 What solution do professionals have?

Regain Software has developed an advanced solution to answer the need of professionals. This software is developed by keeping users’ real-time needs at the center of development to migrate Outlook emails to Office 365 account.. Here is a glance at its prominent features:

• It allows adding multiple PST files to be migrated in a single go.
• A mapping facility for the specific migration to a particular mailbox migration is also provided.
• There is no size limitation on PST files; it can easily migrate the maximum limit of PST files.
• Along with emails, it also enables the migration of tasks, notes, attachments, and calendars.
• It properly maintains the folder hierarchy and meta properties; keeps originality intact.
• This utility is compatible with all versions of M.S. Outlook and Windows O.S.
• Speed and user-friendly interface make it a very handy utility.

How does this tool migrate Outlook Emails to Office 365 Accounts?

The utility developed by Regain Software is very advanced as well as user-friendly in use. Below, a step-by-step process to migrate Outlook emails to Office 365 account is explained. Have a look:

• Firstly, install and launch the Regain PST to Office 365 Migration tool.
• Click on the Connect button to add your Office 365 account if you are unable to connect using basic authentication. Use Multi-factor authentication as it is sort of mandatory by Microsoft. Use Azure App Client ID and Azure App Tenant ID for the MFA.
• Now by clicking on the Add button o Add folder option, add the required .pst files that you want to migrate to Office 365.
• You will prompt to the “ Mapping PST File to Server Mailbox” page; here, map the PST folder with the Server mailbox.
• You can also filter by the date filter option and check the skip empty folders checkbox.
• Finally, by clicking on the “ Start Importing” button, the process to migrate Outlook email to Office 365 account will be started. You can see the concurrent status of the migration process.
• The software also provides a complete process status report with the job id.
• By clicking on the “Generate Report”, you can save the report in the HTML file format for future reference.

Final words:

When you want to export and import a PST file into Office 365 mailbox, you can use the manual Import/ Export method for one mailbox. If you want to migrate Outlook PST files to Office 365 account in a bulk, you will have to spend a lot of time migrating each mailbox. Moreover, there is no significant email filtering or exclusion of unwanted emails. Similarly, to conduct safe and secure migration, you must use a professional tool, Regain PST to Office 365 Migration tool, with adequate features.  Additionally, this tool comes with a free trial version, which allows users to import the first 30 emails per folder free of cost.

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