Importing Mailbox on macOS Monterey ... now generates many, many subfolders.

Question

Importing Mailbox on macOS Monterey ... now generates many, many subfolders.

Dear Apple Community:

I just moved to a new 14" M1 MacBook Pro running Monterey. I am trying to import 10-years of email saved on an external RAID hard drive. Organized in folders (Year, Month). This used to work perfectly for many years, until now.

Instead of a single folder (2020-01 in the example below, see image), I end up with a complicated folder structure ... which would take many hours to fix manually. Does anyone know how to avoid this problem?

Any help would be much appreciated, ALX

Posted on Dec 13, 2021 5:43 PM

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Answer 1

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,540 points

Dec 14, 2021 5:24 AM in response to Alexander Glaser

It doesn’t look at all like those were organized into folders for Years and Months, but like the Mail Library storage scheme.

You appear to have imported directly from a Mail Library and Apple has finally implemented import such that it recognizes the folder structure when importing.

Did you export the messages to the external drive or just copy the Mail Library?

I’ll have to do some testing to see if I can recreate the issue and confirm my theory as to what is going on.

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Answer 2

Dec 15, 2021 10:33 AM in response to Barney-15E

Dear Barney-15E:

You are correct when you say that I copied/zipped mail folders from the library. That's what I've been doing for the last 10-15 years, and it worked just fine. See the attached image of the content of the unzipped MBOX file. So, basically, the import is now "correctly" reproducing the sub-folder structure which is --unfortunately-- not what I want in this case. (I guess an "option" to ignore or respect the folder structure would be useful for me right now).

Of course, I could from now on use the "Export" function, but this wouldn't solve the dilemma with the existing archive.

Thanks!

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Importing Mailbox on macOS Monterey ... now generates many, many subfolders.

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