Transfer Outlook to a new PC: mail, settings and contacts

Start with the account type, not with the export wizard.

The new machine is ready, Outlook opens on an empty inbox, and you are looking for the one button that brings everything across. By the end of this page you will know which part of your mail comes back on its own, which part you have to fetch by hand, and the order to do it in.

Almost every guide on this subject opens with "export a .pst file". For most people that is the wrong answer, and it costs an afternoon nobody needs to spend. So the first question is not how to export. It is what kind of account is sitting in your Outlook.

Check it on the old computer in two clicks. Open File > Account Settings > Account Settings and look at the Type column on the Email tab. One word there decides everything that follows.

• Microsoft Exchange, which is what a Microsoft 365 subscription or an Outlook.com address usually shows: your data lives on the server.
• IMAP/SMTP: your mail is on the server, but your archive and any folders you created yourself may not be.
• POP/SMTP: everything is on this computer and nowhere else. This is the only case where you can genuinely lose mail.

Ten years ago that column said POP for almost everyone. Today it usually says Exchange, and that single shift is why the standard advice on this topic has quietly gone out of date.

With Microsoft 365, Outlook.com or Exchange there is nothing to move at all.

If the column says Exchange, stop reading about export files. Add the account on the new PC, make a coffee, and Outlook downloads your folders, your calendar and your contacts again.

Exporting a .pst here is not just unnecessary, it works against you. You create a second, frozen copy of a mailbox that keeps running without it, and importing that copy later leaves you with every message twice.

Read the bottom half of that table twice. Nobody writes to us about the top half. The bottom half is what people email about two weeks later, when the new PC is running and something still feels wrong.

A .pst file transfer to a new computer is a copy job, and Windows 10 and 11 keep the file in the same place.

If you searched for how to transfer a .pst file rather than how to export one, you may already have the file. In that case skip the wizard: a .pst is an ordinary file, and copying it to a USB stick or a network share is a perfectly valid way to move it. Microsoft puts it here on both Windows 10 and Windows 11:

C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Outlook Files

Not sure which file Outlook is actually using? Ask Outlook instead of guessing. Under File > Account Settings > Account Settings, the Data Files tab lists every attached file with its full path.

One warning that saves a lot of grief. If the only file you find has an .ost extension, do not copy it. Microsoft is blunt about it: "You can't move that file from one computer to another." An .ost is an offline cache that Outlook rebuilds by itself when you add the account.

Somebody wrote to us last spring after tidily copying the largest file on the old disk, wiping the machine, and discovering that Outlook on the new PC would not open it. It was an .ost, all fourteen gigabytes of it. The mail was safe on the server, which he did not believe for a full day. The biggest file on the disk is usually the one you cannot use.

Close Outlook before you copy anything. If you only want to read the file on the new PC rather than merge it in, open it through File > Open & Export > Open Outlook Data File.

Export on the old PC, set up the account on the new one, then import.

When there really is local mail, this is the route. In classic Outlook on the old machine:

1. Go to File > Open & Export > Import/Export. The Import and Export Wizard opens.
2. Choose Export to a file, then Outlook Data File (.pst).
3. Select the account or folder at the top of the list. You can only export one account per pass.
4. Tick Include subfolders. Miss that box and you take the Inbox without a single folder underneath it.
5. Click Browse, save the file somewhere off the machine, and finish with Finish.

Attachments look after themselves. Microsoft states that "when Outlook exports emails, it includes any attachments to the emails".

On the new PC, set up your email account before you import anything. Without a mailbox, Outlook has nowhere to put the messages and quietly parks them in a separate data file beside your account instead of inside it.

1. Go to File > Open & Export > Import/Export again.
2. Choose Import from another program or file, then Outlook Data File (.pst).
3. Browse to your file and decide how Outlook should handle duplicate messages and contacts.
4. Enter the password if there is one, pick the destination folder, and click Finish.

Imports run slower than exports, so leave it alone on a large file. The full procedure is in Microsoft's own export guide, checked on 8 August 2026.

New Outlook will export a .pst for you, but it will not import one.

New Outlook now ships ready to go on most new machines, and this is where roughly half of all migrations stall. The export half exists: go to Settings > Files > Export and choose Get started.

The other half does not. Microsoft writes that "importing a mailbox or calendar using a .pst file is currently not supported in new Outlook at this time", and adds that "calendar and contacts items saved in .pst files will not be accessible in this version". You can browse a .pst and drag messages out of it, but the appointments and contacts inside it stay invisible.

So do the import in classic Outlook, land the mail in an account that syncs, and switch over afterwards with the toggle at the top right of the window. Ten minutes of detour beats an afternoon of hunting for a button that was never built.

Which Outlook you end up living in is a separate decision, and the practical differences are set out in Microsoft 365 vs Office 2021: Which Should You Choose?.

Rules, folder views and blocked senders are not inside a .pst file.

This is the part hardly anyone mentions, and it is what you notice for weeks. Not the mail. The mail is there.

Microsoft says it plainly on the export page: "Outlook does not export meta-data such as folder properties (views, permissions, and AutoArchive settings), message rules, and blocked senders lists."

On your desk that reads as follows. The folder you had sorted by sender for years is back on date order. The rule that filed invoices into a subfolder does nothing. The newsletter you blocked in 2021 is back in the inbox tomorrow morning. None of it is broken. None of it ever travelled.

The same goes for Quick Parts, your custom dictionary and any colour categories that lived on a local data file. Give yourself one evening to set those up again, or let them go. Half restoring them costs more time than starting fresh.

Your settings, signatures and rules each need their own trip.

Three things people expect to find in the export, three separate routes.

Account settings. Microsoft is direct about this: "Moving a .pst file from one computer to another doesn't transfer your email account settings." Write down the incoming and outgoing server names, the user name (often not your email address), the port numbers and the encryption type from More Settings before you switch off the old machine. Passwords are never shown anywhere, so reset them at the provider while you still have a working setup.

Signatures. On a Microsoft 365 or Outlook.com mailbox with Outlook build 2303 or higher, signatures are stored in the mailbox and appear on every device where that account is set up. On POP, IMAP and on-premises Exchange they are files in your profile. Close Outlook and copy the whole folder to the same place on the new PC:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Signatures

Rules. In classic Outlook, go to File > Manage Rules & Alerts, click Options and choose Export Rules. You get an .rwz file that imports through the same buttons on the new machine. That file type only opens in classic Outlook, and imported rules are appended to the end of your list rather than slotted back into their old order.

The AutoComplete list. Those addresses that appear as you type are not a file but a hidden item in your mailbox, named along the lines of IPM.Configuration.Autocomplete_ followed by a long string. Microsoft describes a way to move it with the MFCMAPI tool.

Do not. You would be poking around inside your mailbox with a diagnostic tool to rescue a list that rebuilds itself within a fortnight and is stuffed with addresses you mistyped in 2019. A new computer is the one occasion where that list gets cleaned out for free.

Your contacts and calendar follow the account, unless they were only ever local.

On a Microsoft 365, Outlook.com or Exchange account there is nothing to do here. Appointments and contacts belong to the mailbox and arrive with your mail.

The people who get caught are those who spent years on a POP account and built an address book in a local folder. To lift those out separately, perhaps because you also want them on a phone, export them on their own: File > Open & Export > Import/Export > Export to a file > Comma Separated Values, then pick the Contacts folder under the right account.

A CSV is convenient because almost anything reads it. If you want them back in Outlook exactly as they were, categories and custom fields included, choose the .pst format instead. A CSV keeps columns, not structure.

If the move is also your moment to leave an ageing Outlook behind, the classic version in something like Microsoft Office 2021 Pro Plus is the one where the Import and Export Wizard described above is still fully present.

Still not working? These are the causes that usually turn out to be true.

Four things account for the large majority of cases where the new Outlook does not behave:

• You imported before the account existed. The messages are there, but in a standalone data file next to your mailbox rather than in it. Drag the folders into the right account afterwards.
• You are in new Outlook looking for the import button. It is not there. Switch back to classic with the toggle at the top right, import, then switch forward again.
• The mail arrived but cannot be found. That is not an import fault: the search index has to work through the imported file, which takes hours on a large .pst. If search is still empty afterwards, work through Outlook search not working: how to repair the search function?.
• Outlook will not connect at all on the new PC. That is credentials or server settings rather than data; the causes are covered in Outlook not connecting to server: solutions and fixes.

If none of that lands, email us with the account type from the Type column and the exact wording of the message on screen; those two details usually settle it in a single reply.

Here is what keeps proving true across these migrations. Nobody loses their mail. What people lose is their habits, and that is oddly harder. Everything is present, and the new Outlook still feels like somebody else's for a fortnight because the sort order changed and the folder that always sat at the top is now somewhere in the middle of the list. Leave the old machine switched off in a corner while that settles, rather than wiping it the same evening.