I cannot find the On My Mac mailboxes after migrating the contents of my 2009 iMac to a new iMac 24" running Monterey using Time Machine. They are not found for import by the Mail routine. Over 10K messages were moved so I am quite sure that they were migrated. Where are they? Any suggestions where they might be hidden or how I can retrieve them from the old iMac?
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
iMac, OS X 10.11
Thanks for this advice. I used something similar to this process. I logged my old and new iMacs into one another. I did an Export of the On My Mac mailboxes of the old Mac, and sequentially exported each to the new Mac. They ended up in an Email>applications folder on the new Mac. I then used the Mail import feature on the new Mac to import all .mbx mailboxes to On My Mac on the new Mac computer.
Are your On MY Mac mailboxes visible in mail? If not then hover over the "+" sign to the right and open the drop down menu. If your mail boxes are there but empty then the emails are on the TM drive. They would be located in ~library/mail/V folder. If you open Finder then using the option key select "Go" then library and look from there then open TM to find the folders at that location. You would need to work down through the folders until you find each On My Mac mail folder then copy to your desktop. Then within mail import back in.
When setting up a new Mac the correct process is to use Apple's Migration Assistant. to transfer your data. I think from your description that is not what you did. Time Machine has a serious problem in that its storage of emails is such that they are almost impossible to reconstruct for an average user. If you are a person who saves a lot of email messages I strongly recommend that instead of Time Machine, you convert to another backup app such as Carbon Copy Cloner. It saves all emails in their original format, unlike Time Machine.
I think that I did use Migration Assistant in setting up the new machine, and I said that the data was coming from a Time Machine backup. Should I have said that it was coming directly from the old Mac?
As I understand it people successfully do it both ways. I have always done it by connecting the two computers with a USB cable and having a quick response. I think if you do a transfer from computer to computer it should then duplicate everything in the new computer (other than the Apple installed apps). I do not like Time Machine as it seems to cause a lot of problems including the issue related to saved emails I mentioned. As I understand it , it's possible to find the Time Machine emails but very difficult to do and I cannot advise you as to how to go about that. Sorry.
I can't find the On My Mac mailboxes after migrating data to a new iMac
