mail message import failed: Make sure you have available space in your home folder and try again.

Question

mail message import failed: Make sure you have available space in your home folder and try again.

MacOS Mojave: 10.14.2 new MacMini

When I open Mail I get a message : "... Mail needs to import your messages ..." When I click Continue I get an error: message import failed: "Make sure you have available space in your home folder and try again."

Get info on my hard disk says I have 300 GB free, that should be enough for my mail. :)

I have run Disk Utility First Aid, I have reinstalled MacOS.

How do I solve this problem?

Output of df -h in the shell

df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity iused ifree %iused Mounted on

/dev/disk1s1 466Gi 183Gi 280Gi 40% 2886295 9223372036851889512 0% /

devfs 194Ki 194Ki 0Bi 100% 672 0 100% /dev

/dev/disk1s4 466Gi 2.0Gi 280Gi 1% 1 9223372036854775806 0% /private/var/vm

map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /net

map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% 0 0 100% /home

Mac mini 2018 or later

Posted on Dec 29, 2018 5:36 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

George Colpitts Author

Level 1

27 points

Jan 5, 2019 3:13 PM in response to George Colpitts

Solved.

The error message seems to be wrong, the problem was with permissions not available space. Running Disk Utility/First Aid did not fix the problem.

It seems to be a bug that it did not. I worked with Support on this and at one point they suggested I fix permissions on Mail.App by doing a Get Info and

then doing an "Apply to enclosed items ..." under the gearbox in Sharing and Permissions. That didn't work.

Being asked to rerun Migration Assistant motivated me to do some investigation. Mail worked on the old Mac that I migrated from.

I compared the problem machine to the machine with the working Apple Mail. In both cases the directory where the mail is stored ~/Library/Mail/V6 looked the same,

both seemed to have all my mail messages. So I decided to try something similar to what Support asked me to do earlier with fixing permissions,

I did a Get Info on ~/Library/Mail/V6 and then in the gearbox dropdown under Sharing and Permissions did a "Apply to enclosed items ..." and that fixed it.

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