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>>>
