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

[btoth]

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...

[karavite]

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!)

[Pg1]

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.

[btoth]

Originally Posted by karavite

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.

[karavite]

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! :-)

[Zammy-Sam]

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..

[jhogeterp]

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!

[Zammy-Sam]

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..