HOWTO - Properly Re-Import Old Mail to Mail 2 (for clean-installs & archive-installs)

[FlashMac]

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.

[Harvey]

Worked like a charm. You guys rock!

[Harvey]

Worked like a charm, thanks all!

[yakasha]

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?

[snipper]

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..

[hyde]

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

[snipper]

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.

[Procast]

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