Instead of going through Mail 2's Import menu, do the following (this applies to those of you that backed up your Library and did a fresh install rather than an Upgrade):

1.) Quit Mail 2 if it's running.
2.) Remove the Mail folder from ~\Library (if it exists)
3.) Remove the com.apple.mail.plist from ~\Library\Preferences (if it exists)
4.) Copy your old Mail folder from your backed-up Library to ~\Library
5.) Copy your old mail.plist from your backed-up Library\Preferences to ~\Library\Preferences

Then when you run Mail 2, it will update your old mail and settings properly.

I'm not sure if there are leftover files in the Mail folder that could safely be deleted though after this process...

Oh man, I just did the Mail 2 import, moved mailboxes all over the place (out of the dumb "import" mailbox...) and now I see this post! :) By the way, do you have any hints for transferring Addresses in Address book (I have a clean install and my 10.3.9 system carbon copy cloned to an external firewire drive!)

Open up the old system and export the “All” catalog to vCard. This will give you your whole library of contacts as one file. Then export the groups that you have. (File sizes should be extremely small. I have roughly 3000 contacts and it barely breaks 800k)

When you go into the new version, you can then import all those vCards and it will just say “duplicate cards found” and in shouldn't make copies.

Good luck.

Oh man, I just did the Mail 2 import, moved mailboxes all over the place (out of the dumb "import" mailbox...) and now I see this post! :) By the way, do you have any hints for transferring Addresses in Address book (I have a clean install and my 10.3.9 system carbon copy cloned to an external firewire drive!)

You can copy your old AddressBook folder from your old Application Support and AddressBook will read it.

Thanks all - I actually used the back up option from 10.3.9 and that worked fine. Now I am on to Final Cut Pro HD! Don't worry, I think a fresh install is the way to go here! :-)

Did the same thing here. Copied the mail1-folder together with the plist to my tiger partition. After the import I lost 6gb. My mailfolder has 3gb. Conclusion: I have it double now. But which folder should I delete? I guess it must be the mail1-folder I copied into my home/Library folder, but I don't want to risk anything. It took mail2 quite some time to import those mails..

Thank you :) I did clean install and was having a hard time getting my mail back. My heart was definitely starting to race. This has put me at ease....ahhh!

ok, seems a little more complicated. After I copied my old mail folder onto my tiger partition, it was about 3gb. Now when I info-click this folder (after the import) it has 6gb. Browsing the folders showed an additional Mail folder in each pop-account-folder. It contains all mails as single files which you can simply open. Now, what am I supposed to delete? Any ideas? I can't afford to waste 3gb of disk space..

I was playing a bit with the files and test-deleted some. It seems the mbox files from mail 1 are the leftovers. Deleting these files from the *.mbox folders does not affect the email content in mail 2.. by now although I restarted few times.

Got it!
Conclusion:
if you want to avoid double mails in your mail folder (not in mail.app) after you imported your mails from mail 1 to mail 2 then simply delete any 'mbox' file in your home/Library/Mail subfolders.

I had problems importing my old mail, so I tried this tip. Dragged my Mail folder to the desktop, copied my old Mail folder in my Library instead, replaced the com.apple.mail.plist file in the same fashion.

Started up Mail 2 -> it suggests to import old mail. When I choose not to, all I got is an empty 'starter set' of mailboxes.

What am I doing wrong?

OK... finally, it worked at the 4th attempt, by copying straight from the cdrom instead of from the folder I had used before to import the old mail.. :)

hey all,

i've just installed (upgraded to) Tiger, and everything's doing well except for Mail... I tried to run Mail2... it suggests to import old messages... i said OK... and it keeps stopping at number 5198 or so... i made a previous backup, so i replaced the mail folder and the mail.plist file, but the same problem appears on and on...
could anybody please be of some help?

Correct me if i'm wrong; but shouldnt this be in the HOW-TO section of the forums? :confused:

Hey, this does not deserve a new thread, but it relates to Mail for Tiger and is driving me nuts. Mail in Tiger seems to have an auto correct feature and I can't turn it off. Whenever I type "FYI" it spells out "for your information." I don't want it to do this and I I use "fyi" a lot! I can find nothing in preferences or help.

Duh, never mind. It was Grammarian not Mail! Amazing the old thing still works in Tiger!

riccbhard: It's a leftover from the days when we had a special Tiger forum. We had threads 'bout the same things pop up all over the place, so we stuck the ones that included frequently asked questions. Moving this to the howtos now.

Have you all had to do the Mail 2 import to get your old Mail in Mail 2, or are you importing archived emails?
I booted Mail 2 for the first time since Tiger this week - I'd stopped using Mail a year ago when I switched from a POP to a webmail account.
Anyway, this week I got around to hooking Mail 2 up to my gmail (using their incredibly easy screenshot-rich walkthrough) and when I booted it, it still had all the email from the old Mail, although obviously it couldnt access the server. I don't remember telling to import anything.

Worked like a charm. You guys rock!

Worked like a charm, thanks all!

And for those of us that didn't back up this file because they assumed Apple knew what they were saying when they wrote their help docs?

:(

I'd like to think of it as.. 999 out of a 1000 things in OS X work smoothly now, by 10.4, but since OS X has thousands of bits and pieces.. there is still some bug to solve here and there - and since the number of pieces keeps growing..

does anyone know what to do if I upgraded to tiger, not fresh installed? I cant' get my mail to import, it just sets up import 1 import 2 mailboxes. thank you!

powerbook titanium g4

There is a lot a problems around this. What works best is to quit Mail and manually put the old mail file in the new folder at Users/Username/Library/Mail or Users/Username/Library/Mail/Mailboxes - I forgot since it is months ago since I did it. Just Google for more info about this.

I had the same problem : a good carbon copy of my 10.3.9 System on a Firewire HD;
a clean install of Tiger on my iBook-G4… and migration nights.

Mail 2 would only import empty folder out of my old ~/library/mail folder !
at the same time, any Mailboxe creation (+) was stopped by an error message !
AppleHelp says it is a permission problem,
so I corrected a copy of the old Mail-folder autorisations, with getInfo and 'apply inside' button, and filled Read & Write for user, group and other… it did not help.

But a simple Solution is to remove only 1 file :
On the Tiger drive, go to /users/~userName/Library/Mail/ ;
Remove the file : Mailboxes ; which is a file at that time, and not a folder as in Jaguar.
Restart Mail (2.0) to import your Mail !
it works.
NB : you still may have to proceed one mailboxe at a time;
and use the "Import : Other" option rather than ": previous Mail app."

I first saw this tip at <Mail 2.0 [Archive] - AppleInsider> :
<http://forums.appleinsider.com/archive/index.php/t-53558.html>

Now that everybody is waiting for Leopard, it's a late tip anyway.
Procast

My family techies backed up my files before installing Tiger.

I've tried to import the mbx files without success. I've tried the suggestions on this thread. I believe I have a problem because only mbx files were saved rather than the Library files.

My only back up is a cd with a list of document files, photos, and mbx files.

What do you suggest?

Thanks in advance.