Hi there and welcome to the Forums!
I've been a WLM user for several years now and have spent some time on WX with it and the new native WX Mail. I currently only use 2 Email accounts with my WLM 2011, and have 4 Email accounts on my WLM 2012 on WX. But, things should work the same with more accounts from what I've seen. WLM is a much more stable app than Outlook.
Also, thanks very much for posting your hardware specs--so often we are left to guess! Nice job.
You simply need to go into your Windows File Explorer in WX (or Windows Explorer in earlier versions), and look for this path:
LocalDisk C:\Users\%Username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail **This is the magic jelly bean you need to backup all your WLM accounts, folders and files! I usually charge big $$ to tell people this. You can find yourself if you don't mind spending a few hundred hours scouring the web. I've also attached a screenshot here for you of what it looks like on my Vista PC with WLM 2011. From what I can tell, it has the same location on WX.
On your last item, yes, you'll have to completely reinstall your WLM 2012 from what I've seen on Win7-->WX upgrades. Haven't done the Win8/8.1-->WX upgrade yet, but I expect it to be the same. One thing you may not know or not have noticed, if you are running Win7/8/8.1 and perform the upgrade to WX, Microsoft
DELETES whichever version of WLM you happen to be running on that computer (WLM2008-WLM2012), and converts all your E-mail accounts/files/folders into WX native Mail app.
However, this conversion will not work very well. Especially if you have POP3 or IMAP4 webmail accounts from ISPs such as sbcglobal (or
Cox, Charter, Verizon, AT&T, etc.). You'll have to go into manual server settings on each and every E-mail accounts and visit their tech support pages and find the right
INCOMING & OUTGOING and
security/encryption and
port number settings for each E-mail account. This is a huge pain; especially with your number of E-mail accounts.
I would try 2 or 3 and just see how it goes. It took me days to get my 4 E-mail accounts working on my WX laptop. And I've been an E-mail administrator for probably 6 different companies.
One other thing you should be aware of...and this is important.
None of the major ISPs (see partial list I've tested above), currently support IMAP/IMAP4 webmail clients with any versions of WLM. This also happens to be true of Outlook's recent versions, with the exceptions of Outlook clients running under local Exchange E-mail servers or Exchange Active-Sync webmail servers (and that is still quite spotty!). This may be a
HUGE timesaver for you, as I've been working on this for 5 years with Verizon, my local ISP, and they keep promising to fix it but they never do!! If you're not locked into IMAP/IMAP4, on any of your ISP webmail accounts, I suggest you give that thought up right now!!
So, unfortunately, I think you'll have to reinstall all the settings for all 27 of your E-mail accounts on your WLM reinstall on WX. I don't know if I stated that properly above or not, as I tend to get into "techno-babble" all too easily.
Let me know if you run into any difficulties with the rebuild/import.
Best of luck,
<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>
