Help! Mail export/import woes of a noob...

E

electricsoul

Registered
Hi,
I hope someone can help me with this...
I just got my first Mac a few weeks ago, with Panther, and got Mail set up and working, and got a bunch of mail.
When Tiger came in the mail, I couldn't figure out how to export my email, so I just drag-n-dropped my mail boxes to the desktop, and they became .mbox format folders, which I backed up to CD.
Now I can't for the life of me figure out how to get them back into Mail!
I tried the Import feature, and it always says "Error: no valid mbox file was found."
I also tried just putting the mbox folders back into my Home/Library/Mail/Mailboxes folder, and the folder shows up in Mail, but the messages don't.

Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks,
Mark
 
Hi electricsoul and welcome to the forum.
Do you still have your old Library from panther? If so, then there is still some hope. If you erased the disk for the tiger installation, there might be no chance to get your mails back. :(
 
Hi, and thank you for responding and welcoming me.
No, I don't have the old library file.
I think I will survive it... I can still open the emails (.emlx files) from the mbox folders, it's just a pain to find anything because theyre numbered instead of titled.

Thanks anyway.

Mark
 
Oh, you have the .emlx files? So, then you actually have a binding problem only. Well, the situation might not be as hopeless as I suspected. But I have no clue how you could import .emlx files into tigers mail if you tried the obvious steps. Maybe there is a converter for this purpose?
 
Okay, I got this fixed.
Fortunately, after some searching, I found another thread somewhere where people were having similar problems.
Here's what I did:

- completely removed the entire contents of my home/library/mail folder (to desktop), with Mail closed
- logged out and logged back in
- launched Mail, and used the built-in import tool, which NOW worked

Oddly, after the first time, the folders did not show up in Mail, so re-imported, and then the folders showed up, but I had duplicates of all my thousands of emails! To fix this, I used Mailbox>Rebuild on each folder, which worked like a charm.

Mark
 
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