On May 11, 2014, at 7:24 PM, LuKreme <[email protected]> wrote: > 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.
Some of my accounts are IMAP, some are POP, and some are Exchange. My problem, however, is that I keep a lot of mail locally on my mac, and those were the mailboxes and mail folders that were giving me trouble. Thanks for the tip about rebuilding. That may have solved my problem. I'll try that next time. I like Migration Assistant, but I wanted a clean re-install. Could I have asked Migration Assistant to only migrate my email stuff? Thanks, Gregg _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
