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Move Personal Folders to O365

With the larger email quotas (100GB for faculty/staff, 50GB for students) in Office 365, you may want to move mail from your personal folders (.pst files ) to your Office 365 account.  This allows you to access all of your email no matter what computer you are using through your Office 365 web portal. There are two methods to accomplish this: Import, Manual Move. Choose the option below that you are most comfortable with.

 

Import a Personal Folder to Office 365

This option allows you to automatically import a personal folder (.pst file) using the Import/Export option.

  1. Open Outlook desktop client.
  2. Disconnect all personal folders to be imported from the Outlook desktop client.
  3. Right-click on your folder in your folder list and choose Close.
  4. Exit Outlook and then relaunch the Outlook desktop client to assure that personal folders are disconnected.
  5. Create a destination folder in your Inbox that correspond to each personal folder to be imported. For example, if you have a personal folder named Archives, go ahead and create another folder named Archives under your Inbox.
  6. Click on the newly created destination folder to select it. (NOTE:  this is the folder the mail will be imported into).
  7. Choose File | Open & Export.
  8. Choose Import/Export.
  9. Select "Import from another program or file" and click Next.
  10. Select "Outlook Data File (.pst)" and click Next.
  11. Browse to your .pst file, select it, and click Open.
  12. Choose whether you want to allow, replace, or not allow duplicate items. Then click Next.
  13. If you want to import the entire .pst file, select the main folder containing all subfolders. Then select the checkbox labeled "Include subfolders"
    OR
  14. You can Expand the Outlook Data File until you see a specific folder with the emails you want to import, Select that folder.  Then select the checkbox labeled "Include subfolders"
  15. Finally, select the option labeled "Import items into the current folder" and click Finish. 
  16. The emails and folders will appear in your currently selected folder. If you need to make any final adjustments, simply drag and drop the emails and folders to the correct location.
 
 

Manually Move Folders from a .pst file to Office 365

This option allows you to manually open an personal folder (.pst) and choose which subfolders to import. This can be a better option when you want to import only specific folders and subfolders within the personal folder (.pst file).

  1. If your personal folder (.pst file) is not already opened in Outlook 2013/2016, choose File | Open & Export
  2. Choose Open Outlook Data File
  3. Find your personal folder ( .pst file), select it and click Open.
  4. In your folder list at the top, right click on your email address (or account name) and choose New Folder
  5. Name the folder (e.g., pst folder contents)
  6. Next, in the folder list, locate your personal folder and click the arrow to expand the list of folders.
  7. Select a folder and drag it to the new folder you just created under your Office 365 mailbox.
  8. Repeat for each folder you need to move.
  9. When finished, right click on the personal folder and choose Close.