Q I now need to upgrade our MacBook to El Capitan, which I gather is no longer compatible with Microsoft Entourage 2008. How should I migrate its accounts and messages to Outlook 2016?

A Before you do anything, ensure that you have at least one really reliable and current backup of your Entourage mail database. This is located in the folder at ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities. Once you have made that backup, you can be confident that if anything does go wrong, you still have the data. Then perform the Office 2016 upgrade, which should result in your old identity being migrated over to Outlook 2016. Once you are happy with that, upgrade to El Capitan.

Comments Many who formerly enjoyed using Entourage have found Outlook under-powered in comparison, although its new 1016 guise is at least an improvement over the 2011 version. You might like to have a look round at alternatives, including the much improved version of Mail that comes with El Capitan. You could then migrate your old data using the superb shareware Emailchemy, the most versatile tool for transferring mailboxes.

Updated from the original, which was first published in MacUser volume 27 issue 25, 2011.