OK, let me warn you, this is a pain in the butt!  Most Microsoft haters right from go will probably tell you not to do it, but after using Thunderbird for a year, I chose to go back to Outlook because Thunderbird just isn’t as good as Outlook (unstable file sizes and all)

While it was easy and fast to export email from Outlook to Thunderbird, going in the other direction is not easy, because Thunderbird apparently doesn’t want to help anyone export out of their software.

I had to download a program called IMAPSize which happens to include an exporter that converts Thunderbird Mbox files into .eml files which can then be dragged and dropped into either Outlook Express or Outlook Expresses replacement, currently called Windows Live Mail and formerly called Windows Mail.

It was pretty easy getting the emails from .eml format into Windows Live Mail, simply go select the files within windows file explorer and then drag and drop them into the live program folders (ergo crank up windows live mail like you are going to write an email and drag and drop those computer files into the windows live mail folders).

It may take a while to process so do not panic if you see the circular spinning icon of purgatory, YOU ARE NOT DEAD YET Vista is just waiting to determine your fait. 

Once all your emails are loaded into Windows Live Mail you may be flumoxed, confouned, annoyed and left searching Google for an answer to the question, Where the hell is the Export button in Windows Live Mail???

This definitely left me confounded and annoyed, until I realized that the first question I should have asked is Where the hell is the menu system in Windows Live Mail.  My default installation of the program left the menu system hidden, so I had to unhide the menu then I quickly found the Export button in the File menu item.

Once you click export you may be confounded anew, when it FAILS to give you an option labeled ‘Outlook’ instead you get Microsoft Windows Live Mail (the stupid program you are actually in already!) or Microsoft Exchange which is the right choice in this case, and which is promptly proven after you click it on an educated guess.  The pop up menu then tells you that Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook are the targets for the export.

But don’t hit that OK button until you check the tip at the bottom of this article! 

who says the most important content in any article should go towards the top?  we’re saving the good stuff for the very end, don’t miss it or you will waste some cycles

Then you are almost there, just wait for your messages to export

Note I’m not sure but the export might go faster if you make sure that Outlook is closed before you do this step.  It might also help if you send out negative twitter messages about Steve Jobs and his tendency to buy livers out from under poor people in Tennessee.  Not saying its right, just saying it might speed the program up under the Schroedinger’s Cat Principle.

Now don’t fret if it doesn’t show the true number of emails in your folders at first, mine initially showed just 1k email, then it caught up a bit later

If you have a butt load of emails, don’t expect a fast export.  Fortunately, you can select multiple folders so you will not have to repeat this for every stupid folder that you want to export to Outlook, so just sit back and chill, or go find something better to do. 

As you are working on a desktop application, your browser should be free so this would be a great time to surf around the internet, gossip on Facebook, update your LinkedIn profile talking about your Outlook expertise, or hide under your desk and take a nap.

Just to let you know that Windows Live Mail did not completely screw up, you should see this message when the export is done.

Read This Tip Before you Export from Windows Live Mail

If you were smart enough to setup the same folder structure in Windows Live Mail and in Outlook before the export (aren’t you glad I’m telling you now, instead of when it might have been useful?  leave your comment complaints below) then when you open up Outlook the emails will magically appear in the right folders automatically and you are done!

Aren’t You Glad that is Over?

Now don’t you ever think about leaving Outlook again!

BTW

here are some resources that I used to figure this out.  Some of them helped a little bit, none of them helped with the full solution, and a few may have lead me astray . . . .

http://email.about.com/od/mozillathunderbirdtips/qt/et_export_to_oe.htm

http://www.broobles.com/imapsize/th2outlook.php – would have been perfect a couple years ago

http://www.vistax64.com/vista-mail/114559-export-wlm-emails-outlook.html

http://email.about.com/od/hotmailtips/qt/et072804.htm

http://www.freeemailtutorials.com/windowsLiveMail/addressBooksAndContacts/exportContacts.htm

http://download.com

http://microsoft.com

Since November of 2008, PC User’s have benefited from the WordPress Theme Generator called Artisteer and now that WordPress Generator desktop application is available for Apple / Mac users.  The initial Mac beta was just released and people that purchase/have purchased a PC license will also have the ability to use the license on a Mac or vice versa on a PC.

I have been giving demonstrations of WordPress as a Content Management System for several months which includes a demo of Artisteer and the first question that is always asked is, “Does Artisteer work on a Mac?”

Now the answer is YES!  Artisteer does work on Macs.

Better yet, existing Artisteer users already know that when you purchase a license, that license will receive free upgrades for a year.  I have personally created almost 100 WordPress themes since purchasing Artisteer last fall, and I have significantly benefited from many many upgrades to the software.  This latest upgrade ads more Avatar support for WordPress, ads support for Dot Net Nuke and past upgrades provided support for Joomla & Drupal templates and much much more.

here’s the latest news release from Artisteer about the Mex Mac Capability

Artisteer for Mac (Beta) has arrived!
Artisteer 2.2 for Mac (Beta) is now available by clicking here. Couple interesting facts:

• Artisteer for Mac joins the family of products based on cross-platform .NET framework known as Mono.
• Artisteer might be the first product for Mac OS utilizing the ribbon interface first introduced in Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows.

Technical notes and known issues for beta testers:

• Artisteer for Mac runs on Intel based hardware with OS X version 10.5 (Leopard).
• Artisteer for Mac requires X11 which is usually installed by default on OS X 10.5.
• Artisteer may require approx 1 minute to start the first time after installation.
• The "Open" and "Save" dialogs display Windows style folder structure and may require additional navigation to desired Mac folders.
• The top Mac menu bar does not offer an option to quit Artisteer. Use the Artisteer menu, keyboard shortcut ‘Command’+'Q’, or the red window close button to quit.
• Keyboard shortcuts stop working after clicking anywhere within the web design preview area.
• Certain amount of instability and limitations (as above) are expected due to limitations of the current Mono framework 2.4.
• There is a slight chance that your Mac computer may freeze when using Artisteer (this happened once in our tests). Please save all your work often in case you need to reboot your computer.

Customers who purchased an Artisteer license can use it on both PC and Mac computers (one each) during the beta period. An official release date of the Mac version will be planned after receiving detailed  issue reports from our beta testers and determining how much work is needed to resolve those issues.
Please send feedback and report reproducible issues to our support via the Contact Us page.

Artisteer version 2.2 update
We are releasing a new update to Artisteer 2.2 to resolve a few recent issues reported in the previous version 2.2 Beta.

• Artisteer: Added "Options" button in the export dialog.
• Artisteer: Added DotNetNuke Skin export announced below.
• Artisteer: Fixed a bug with the font size being altered by changing Articles -> Line Height.
• WordPress: Improved compatibility with Avatar List plugin.
• Joomla: Resolved custom footer not showing up.
• Joomla: Resolved centered menus not shown correctly.
• Joomla: Resolved a problem with the text "’30′, ‘height’ => ‘30′ near h2" showing on some pages.
• Joomla: Fixed incorrect path to spacer.gif in script.js file in Joomla templates.
• Drupal: Fixed an issue with broken image appearing instead of a logo uploaded in Drupal.

The new version 2.2.0.17297 can be obtained by clicking here and may become the officially released version 2.2 after additional testing.

Note: Cross posted from The LiveWriterz.

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A lot of people have been trying to get access to the new Google Voice service.  People have even auctioned off their existing accounts for as much as $1,000 according to some reports, but today may be the day when things open up to the rest of us!

The Today Show takes a look at Google Voice this morning (as we did three months ago), with correspondent Janet Shamlian offering a very generalized overview of its call filtering/forwarding and voicemail transcription features. We’re keeping an eye on it, but Google Voice’s login page is still pegged with "Coming soon" and "Existing GrandCentral users." Still, Shamlian confirmed that Google Voice would be "available today, nationwide," so stay tuned if you’re eager to grab a number and try it out. Thanks Pat!

Lifehacker - Google Voice May Open to All Today - Google Voice

Like a lot of people, I struggle with ideas for Mother’s Day gifts. Sometimes, I think of good gifts, and sometimes I miss the boat. I was toying with the idea of buying my Mom leather chaps. She sometimes goes riding with my Dad on his bike, and I couldn’t think of anything better. I even toyed with getting Dad a matching pair as well as an early father’s day gift. But the idea of giving my parents, essentially ‘assless chaps’ just sounded to bizarre. Fortunately, I was saved with this gem of an idea!

Its basically a key chain picture frame. $9.99 (FREE Shipping) - Coby DP151-BLK 1.5" Digital Picture Frame Keychain - Black I think that’s a great idea for a gift. My Mom can work a flash card and camera just fine, but when it comes to pictures on a phone, she’s a bit of a loss.

This way I can email her pictures of the grand kids and she can keep them with her close.

Now, if that doesn’t sound just right for your Mom, here are a few other ideas.

	$74.99 - Olympus FE20 8.0 Megapixel Digital Camera - Silver
	$19.97 - Trekstor 74012 2GB i.Beat p!nk MP3 and Video Player (Pink)
	$74.99 - Iomega 34209 eGo High-Speed USB Portable 320GB Hard Drive - Ruby Red
	$49.99 - G7 Productivity VersaJette M300 v8 Special Edition Inkjet Printer

DISCLOSURE – I am a blogger, not a reporter, more akin to a philosopher and my interests are my own.  If you want objectivity, search else where.  This is social media baby, not the encyclopedia Britannica.

Why did I start out this article with that quirky stupid disclosure? 

The answer is that I was inspired by a Social Media Blow hard, some might even use the term Social Media Douche Bag.  I read the article (image below) by Andy Sernovitz, who has uniquely positioned himself as the head judge or prosecutor in the witch trial of the blogosphere. 

Its kind of like Satan running a witch trial.  (I’m not religious and if you are a satanist I don’t care). 

Andy yaps in the article below about paid blogging and disclosure in blogs.  Weirdly the fool gloriously promotes his interviewee and himself in the article without regard to the 5 links to himself & 1 or 2 to his interviewee.  Watching Andy work is almost like watching the Pope in a porn movie with a glow in the dark condom(did I mention I’m not religious? If I have failed to insult your religion please leave me a comment and I’ll get right on that . . .).

That said, you might ask me why I’m making all the stupid religious references in an article about social media busy bodies? 

The answer is that too many people treat social media like a religion.  Its true that religions are probably one of the earliest forms of social networking.  There is a lot of potential for analogy and example, but I want to focus strictly here on the manifestation common in religion of the pompous hypocrite, or that unique fool that thinks their own damn crap doesn’t stink, steps up on a soap box to preach to YOU why yours does, and why you should LISTEN to them or be damned for ever.   Good thing PeeWee Herman never did any PSA’s against Masturbation, it left the door wide open for Andy to be a bigger hypocrite.

Andy likes the word Damn, so I thought I’d use it a little.  You can let the song ‘Your so Vane’ run through your head every time you read the word damn if you like.

So here is where the hypocrisy above is revealed a bit.  You can also find a little more about how Andy Serbonitz does business on Ted Murphy’s blog.  DISCLOSURE – Note I have more disclosures already than Andy had.  So I repeat DISCLOSURE - Note, no matter how many times you write that word it still doesn’t disclose anything all by itself, you actually have to ‘explain’ something afterwards. 

So here is my Disclosure explanation following the reference to Ted.  I consider Ted a business partner, whom I’ve done business with many times.  I’ve spent a lot of money on Ted’s services and in some cases Ted has spent some money on my own.  Where I come from this is generally referred to as either ‘Putting your money where your mouth is’ or in business circles ‘building trust’.  Ted’s not perfect by a mile and a half, but he does try to improve and largely succeeds, which is why I will do more business with him in the future.   It doesn’t hurt that his services can be effective as well! 

With that said, I do hope that Andy Serbonitz will eventually make some improvements himself and start practicing what he preaches.  Its easy to throw stones (look at my article here for example, I do not savor vitriol, but if you let BS fester in the blogosphere people start to accept it as fertilizer and before you know it they are digging around it for peanuts or something so consider this the antibiotic). 

Now, I know and you know that Andy knows that he is full of it.  The goal with the comments below is to help him come to realize that he needs to do something about it and make some changes in his perspective and tactic so that he can be more effective.  He wants to make the blogosphere better.  Great!  So do I, so do a lot of people.  Let’s get to work doing it instead of feeding people garbage through a prominent blog while getting hefty back links 5 at a time.

The REPLY that coulda, shoulda, woulda been

This started as my reply in the form of a comment on the Huffington Post, but the comment and analysis grew too long.  On Andy’s own site and the Huffington Post, transparency and discussion is not exactly the goal.  The goal is to establish elites that are designated to preach to you, not for you to use your brain and think back at them.

My comment to Andy’s article

Obviously you have absolutely no comprehension of the topic you are writing about OR you simply are citing gibberish as you purposefully break all of your own pompous rules.

In this article you link to Bob Garfield’s site twice without nofollow links.

Nice pay off from the Huffington Post in Google PR Juice - Do you pay off all of your interviewees with links from this site?

But you don’t stop there.  You next link to your own sites without including nofollow links 5 times in this single article.  That’s 5 links to yourself and 2 links to your interviewee.   Great Ethics Andy, I’m sure Matt Cutt’s will happily spank down the Huffington Post for your activities.

Your hypocrisy does not even stop there.  In this article you fail to follow your own advice.  No disclosure at the top of the article that you are promoting your interviewee & promoting your multiple websites & organizations. 

You self promote your own articles with abandon, ironically if a person reads any of your articles that you cite here, they will find that you willfully stomp on people on your own site, when they leave comments for their own self promotion.

Lesson - Its OK for Andy to spout off about things he does not believe. Its OK for Andy to drop links with abandon & without nofollow tags. Its OK for Andy to self promote himself endlessly, but its NOT OK for any of Andy’s readers to do the same thing.

Do as Andy Preaches not as Andy does.

But it does not even end there!

IF a person clicks on the link in this article for your consulting firm it is actually damn funny & I use the word ‘damn’ here with knowing irony because you use a curse word in your own domain name which is frankly childish, might as well drop an f bomb to attract traffic too. 

Way to go you google search deceiver, wonder if you also own the domain name ‘damnIwishIthoughtofthatBS.com’ also?

. . . any way if they actually go to your consulting firm & try to learn what you do, they have to wade through endless copy that ultimately says that you are just a strategy consultant, nothing more & nothing less & you do this so that you won’t have any conflict of interest with creative types. 

“We’re not an agency and don’t have creative services or programmers. We just do strategy. It keeps our advice neutral and unbiased.” src

Yet you have a HUGE conflict of interest because not only are you a consultant, but you are the self appointed ethics referee for the blogosphere, which you apparently don’t seem to understand. 

Why anyone would want to pay for strategy advice from a person that will later come around and act as referee to chastise them is probably only understandable if you understand why some people like S & M. 

Do you really charge people to give them good advice or so that they can come back later & be humiliated for failing to do things you can not even do yourself as evidenced by this Huffington Post article?

I’ve previously written up some extensive initial impressions on the SocialSpark CPC system.  I think this has enormous potential both on blogs as well as used on social networks from Twitter to Facebook to Utterli and beyond.  However, it is brand spanking new and needs to grow just a bit.

The problem here with CPC links in Izea is a lack of transparency.  If you think back to what made PayPerPost work in the early days it was the simplicity of the value proposition.  Whether you agreed with that proposition or not it was understandable. 

The advertiser knew exactly what they got and the blogger received immediate gratification for the work (within 30 days).  Things have gotten a lot more complicated on that front over the years, but it has grown on the foundation of that simple business plan.

With CPC there is a lack of transparency for the blogger or social media user that pushes out the link.  If they can not see a report showing why a link is invalid, then they will always question the results.  I hold the suspicion that many of the clicks reported as invalid are invalid. 

ClickForensics, a company that provides the engine behind the SocialSpark system to protect advertisers against click fraud.

However, if the users can not see that they are invalid, they will grumble over the lack of transparency (as they do already in the Izea forums) and that will eventually grow into doubt about the accuracy of the results and then whether or not they are getting ‘ripped off’ somehow. 

I currently do not feel that bloggers or social media users are getting ripped off, but the lack of transparency will foster rumors and complaints in any human based system.

What we need to see in this system is more detail pushed out to the users showing ‘why’ the clicks are invalid.  In general that information would be very valuable to many many users and would help them evolve their blogging and social media practices and that would be very good for business indeed!

ClickForensics must have some data that validates why a click is invalid.  This information needs to be shared with SocialSpark, which needs to add it to the reporting vehicle so that bloggers can drill down and learn why a click did not pay.

You will notice if you dig into the code of this post which includes a real CPC ad from socialspark, that these links DO have rel=”nofollow” tags and there are disclosure requirements that go with these advertising campaigns. (The disclosure badge below is a real example of the disclosure required for a CPC ad offered up in an article like this article).

These campaigns also tend to live by the same rules that applies to all internet advertising.  This is not contextual by default.  So if a blogger includes a link or banner they need to either provide it in a contextual setting that makes sense for their readers, or they need to set up the ad with text or something to explain its presence.  That could be something of a landing page like blog article or even a little snippet of text.

This banner is a real cpc ad for direct advertising.  The banner itself doesn’t exactly set itself up.  So if a blogger provides this link in the vacuum of any other context most readers will have no idea what it is about and probably won’t click on it.  However, if the ad is setup with some information that indi