Apple Mail Importing Workaround

[houltmac]

I am sure that there are plenty of people out there that already know about this, but i thought it was interesting and that I would share my experience anyway.

I deal with Apple Mail (aka Mail.app) a lot. Anyone who is interested in the app should check out Hawk Wings as it's a great resource, and I keep this in my RSS Feeds at all times. I have however just run across a problem that I have never had before.

Migration assistant has always served me well in moving from one version of OS X to another, and this will take your Apple Mail settings with you. If you are moving mail from one Tiger based Mac to another (we are only talking about email, settings etc. in Apple Mail here BTW) then you can head to your users library (Macintosh HD/Users/~/Library) and copy the entire Mail folder as well as the com.apple.mail.plist file from the Preferences folder. Putting these two items in the corresponding places on the new Mac will simply make a 'clone" of the data, preferences and so on of the Original Mac.

That's simple enough right? Try this:

You have already created the same account with the same settings on the new Mac and started downloading mail from your POP server. It's set to instantly delete messages from the server when retrieved. How do you merge the two sets of Apple Mail data? Apple Mail for Tiger has a great little built in utility called Import Mailboxes (in the File Menu), but it doesn't work with other Tiger based Apple Mail mailboxes (sorry about the long winded terminology, have to keep us all on the same page). It would seem it was never thought to be necessary and the update wasn't made.

An update was necessary because in Tiger, Apple Mail had a fundamental change made; the way the messages were stored changed from ".mbox" to ".emlx". This was so that each message was stored as a single entity, allowing Spotlight to index those individual items. Makes sense, except Apple Mail was never updated to allow importing of ."emlx" structures as mailboxes. So what to do? You can't drag and drop, you can't import, you can't move the folder structure or you will over-write the new one you created and have been using for the last week. You could edit stuff terminal junkie style for a month, but I have a better solution.

Grab the files I mentioned before from your new Macs ~/Library and stick them on the desktop for now. Grab the same files from the old Mac and put them in place on the new Mac. You should now have Apple Mail running exactly the same on the new Mac as it did on the old one. Good. Now check out emlx Convert from Comicsoft. 1.2MB download shouldn't hurt you and the app is simple. Just drag all the *.emlx files from your Mail folder (which should be on your desktop) to the space in the application window and then hit "Save mbox...". Give it a name (such as the name of the mailbox you just dragged from [inbox, sent etc.]) and save it to your desktop. You should now be able to import that mbox from your desktop into Apple Mail using the old Import Mailbox function.

In essence you are turning the emails in you downloaded on your new Mac (assuming there are less there than there are on the old one) into the old style mailbox, then importing which will automatically convert them back to the new format. It's a little long winded to explain, but only takes a couple of minutes. Not great, but useful I think. As I said, this is the first time I have had this issue, like Apple expect I simply move and upgrade, I never merge two mailboxes from Tiger usually and besides; I use IMAP

Hope this is useful to someone.

[Raven]

@houltmac - That was excellent. Useful and well-written! Huzzah!

[philbowell]

Matt, if I wanted to 'sync' the Mail.app rules I have setup on my iMac with my iBook, would I just copy the .plist?

I have a few Mail-Act-On rules setup and I want to set them up on my iBook, but haven't got round to it yet. Thought this might be the quickest way to do it.

[houltmac]

@Phil: I have never used Mail-Act-On, so I can't say. I would imagine that it would have it's own plist, or at least it's own set of working files so I doubt this would work. Worth looking in your ~/Library/Preferences folder for corresponding files and even in your Application Support folder also in your ~/Library folder.

As I said, it's hard to say since I have never used it, but that would be my first hunch.

[philbowell]

I think if I use the Mail rules .plist then it should work. Mail-Act-On uses the rules from Mail.app to work, so I guess they will be found there.

edit: It worked, I just copied the mailrules.plist and now I have all the rules from my iMac on my iBook.

[Jono]

Yea, I always just copy over the mail folder & plist files from the library to transfer settings from 1 Mac to another.

I also use emlx converter for my POP accounts & it's always worked well for me