On 11 May 2014, at 11:24 , Dinse, Gregg (NIH/NIEHS) [V] <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi, > > What is the best way to migrate all of my emails and mailboxes (and mailbox > folders and subfolders) after a fresh OS install? My previous installation > of Mountain Lion was acting really flaky (I'm assuming it was a bad hard > drive). So I put a different hard drive in my Mac Pro tower and did a fresh > install of Mountain Lion. I know transferring email is simple if I migrate > my entire user account with Migration Assistant, but I did not want to > transfer corrupted files. If the accounts are IMAP, it’s trivial. If they are POP or you keep a lot of mail locally, it’s much harder, especially after the fact. > Before reinstalling ML, I used the Export Mailbox option under the Mailbox > menu in Apple Mail, which I assumed would create an archive of all my > mailboxes and the emails within. Either this was a false assumption or else > I could not figure out how to properly retrieve the information from the > archive. I tried the Import Mailboxes under the File menu, first pointing at > the folder containing my export and later pointing to the Mailboxes directory > in ~/Library/Mail/V2, but neither worked. I was able to retrieve what seemed > to be the containers for the mailboxes I had created, but I could not see any > emails within them. I tend to create several mailbox folders, with both > mailboxes and other subfolders within them. During the import, if I pointed > to the last mailbox within the hierarchy, I could import those emails, but if > I pointed to any location further back, I would only get folder names (or > nothing). Needless to say, with many hundreds of folders, this took many > hours and was mind-numbing. That SHOULD work to import the mail. Sometimes mail shows up in odd places when you import it or restore it from Time Machine (what I would have done). Try importing, quitting mail, and restarting it. Also, if you see the mailboxes but no mail, try rebuilding them. > I know there is a better way, but I could not find it. Can anyone help me > out? Migration Assistant would be the way to go. It is *very* good at what it does. Time Machine would have been my second choice. Importing from the ~/Library/Mail directories on the old drive would have been my third. Exporting and Importing would have been my last-resort choice. Of course, this all assume my IMAP storage was the issue and not my Mac. -- 'I don't like to ask them questions.' 'Why not?' 'They might give me answers. And then what would I do?' _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
