With a small test you can validate it yourself with a friend using OE.

Copy the file to a flash drive, Attach the file to an email, have your
friend drag it to his desktop, open OE, then drag to the inbox or a user
created folder. Double click to open.

Before wiping Vista, ensure that all drivers are available for
XP(chipset, ide/sata, network etc). It would be a shame to wipe it and
find out later the drivers are not available.

--
...winston
MS-MVP Windows Live Mail
"Mill" wrote in message
. ..
I open the computer with vista (which I am going to reformat and take
to XP Pro) and I have the ability to export messages but they are
in the .eml format and when I try to copy them to flash drive to
save them, it asks if I want to copy the files without their
properties.

Am I going to be able to copy these messages into XP Outlook Express
6?