How can I save my emails?

My 5 year old Dell GX240 Optiplex computer is getting a little stodgy and a friend's indentical one threw a hard drive. The possibility of getting a better one, a year and a half old Shuttle, for a decent price came up when a computer-savvy friend was transferred to London. Now I need to transfer stuff from the old computer and set up the new one.

Of course, there is a problem. I edited all of the pictures and put them on a couple of disks just fine. Same thing for the address book and the favorites. Trying to save the significant emails in the inbox did not go, however.

Hitting the “help” button brought up the instruction to compact them and copy them to the disk. But when the inbox folder is highlighted, the copy function is not available. I know that I am doing something wrong but could not for the life of me figure out what it is.

Goggling this brought the instruction to export the file. Trying to export brought up an error message that “an error occurred while initializing MAPI”. There are several ads that say they can clean up my registry and correct the MAPI.dll. You run the program and find that there are about 500 kajillion errors in the registry and for $30 I can download their registry cleaner. Don't like come-ons like that nor do I want to spend $30 to clean up a computer I am about to replace. Why does Microsoft not have a fix download for MAPI like they do for a bunch of other .dlls and errors ?

What happened to plain old drag and drop? Why can't it be easy like on a Mac?

Someone out there must have a way to fix this. Please tell me what I am doing wrong! I need to be drug screaming and crying into the 21st Century.

After a couple of weeks being away from my computer, there are a couple of things worth an entry today.

Today is the anniversary of the Glorious First of June. In my naval history book it was called the Battle of Ushant. I like the Brit's name, Glorious First of June (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_First_of_June). On this date in 1794, The Royal Navy under Admiral Lord Howe with 26 ships of the line and 9 frigates fought to get the weather and went after Napoleon's fleet of 26 ships of the line and 3 frigates under Admiral Villaret-Joyeuse. The French were escorting a convoy of food and supplies from the Americas. Howe trounced the French with daring maneuvering and seamanship, taking a half dozen ships and sinking a couple more. In that respect a brilliant victory. The French fleets did not ever sortie in force in the Napoeonic Wars after that. The convoy did make it to Brest, however. So a victory for them, too.

The other cause celebre is a note from Jim King of American Timeline: 1800 to 1900 (http://oldwesternfanatic.blogstream.com/). What a great blog he has. I am astonished at the details and facts he finds. I had responded to his entry about President Andrew Johnson's impeachment (http://oldwesternfanatic.blogstream.com/v1/p65.html). His response to me (http://oldwesternfanatic.blogstream.com/v1/pid/221051.html?CP=65&HP=1#TC) showed the depth of his knowledge. Well done to Jim King. Everyone should read his blog daily.