Copying and Moving Mail from Snow Leopard to Lion

I have the same questions! Would anyone please suggest some solutions? THank you very much!!

http://macs.about.com/od/usingyourmac/ss/moving-apple-mail.htm

The above should be a good guide.

Tom

The above should work provded you have never launched OS X Lion mail before you moved the data over. However there is another way. You can use OS X Lion Import Mailboxes, to copy your previous version of Mail into OS X Lion.

While the import process will copy all of the mailboxes and therefore the mail froma previous version, I am not sure it will accuratly recreate the Mail accounts. It will also put all imported mail inside a top lever folder called Imported. You will have to recreate your old mail layout by moving the items within the Import folder to where you want them.

Tom

The difference, in this case, between Leopard and Lion is that you have to manually unhide the Library folder located in your user folder since it's hidden by default by Apple.

This command in Terminal worked for me:

chflags nohidden ~/Library/

I have unhidden my Library (I don't understand why apple did that) and tried to copy the Mail Folder and the plist file.

All that happens when I start Mail is that it opens up the little window where it wants me to enter an email account, just like when no accounts are installed.

There now is a "V2" Folder in the Mail Folder as well - tried to copy all files into this folder too but it didn't work either.

Just to copy the files simply didn't work, at least for me and it seems many other are also having this problem.

Any other suggestions? I will try to import mails but will all my attachments also be copied? because there used to be a Mail downloads folder.

woondidu .... did you manage to solve the problem ????? if yes, how did you do it as I am having exactly the same problem.

My previous post should be addressed to ozdazza

ozdazza .... did you manage to solve the problem ????? if yes, how did you do it as I am having exactly the same problem.

Hi ozdazza,

I have managed to solve the problem and move all my emails from my old mac running 10.5.8 to my new mac running 10.7.2 with the following steps. Please note that in order for these to work, you need to have copy of your old email accounts either at your new mac desktop or in your time machine (or any external HD connected to your new mac)

1- In my new mac, I created email accounts similar to the ones in my old mac (names and setting),

2- I copied my old emails (one email account at a time so I do not get confused) and placed it on my new mac desktop. Please note that inbox messages in OS 10.5.X are stored in user/library/mail/pop.file/inbox.mbox. And outbox messages are stores in user/library/mail/pop.file/outbox.mbox and so forth. For copying messages in your inbox the file you should copy to your desktop is the inbox.mbox NOT the mail file or NOT the pop file.

3- Open your mail app in your new mac and chose “import mailboxes” under file menu.

4- Chose import data from “Apple Mail” which is the first choice.

5- Chose the inbox.mbox file to be imported.

6- After the importing process finish, you will see all your messages in a new folder called “Import” in your mailboxes column within your new mail app.

7- Now click on that import box to display all your messages in the middle column in your email app.

8- Highlight all the messages by clicking comm+A

9- Drag all the highlighted messages to your newly created inbox.

10- After the drag&drop process finished, you can delete the import box.

Above process can be done with the sent.mbox as well, but in such process you use the sent.mbox for old email account and drag its messages (step 9) to the sent file in your new email account box.

I had managed to move or transfer 3 emails account each one with 2 boxes (inbox and sentbox) with a total size of over 8GB in only less than 10 minutes.

The key problem in all my previous import attempts is that I was importing the wrong file and trying to place it in the wrong place.

I hope above process works well for you as it did for me.

Hi there.

All of that last suggestion seems quite unnecessary as of 5/2012 (perhaps something has changed? perhaps not?).

I was having similar problem of migrating from Snow Leopard to Lion - I don't use Time Machine, so I had just dragged the following folders & files over:

~/Library/Mail/

~/Library/Mail Downloads/

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist

~/Library/Keychains/

You must also make sure that there is no "V2" folder in Mail/ - that's the trick.

To be a bit clearer, my problem probably arose because I actually copied the *contents* of each of the folders into their respective folders on my new machine, instead of just dragging them over and overwriting the newer folders. The problem, however, was that on the new machine in the Mail folder, there was a folder called "V2". I decided to leave that folder there, thinking maybe I might break something.

After the migration, opening Mail.app didn't work - it didn't recognize any of my accounts. Instead it urged me to create a new account.

After puzzling for awhile, I went back to my folders and removed the V2 folder by dragging it to the desktop.

I reopened Mail and voila, a window popped up that said that the old data would need to be converted and reorganized to fit the new version of the Mail.app. It took a few minutes and promptly distributed all of my folders into several subfolders in a freshly created "V2" folder.

a

Is Migration Assistant not an option?

You don't have to use the Terminal command to unhide the Library. Just go to the Go menu and then hold down the Option key. Then you can select the Library folder.

Apple hid the Library to stop people doing stuff in there they shouldn't. I think it was a great idea they hid it as I've had a few clients who thought it was a good place to store files or decided they would delete stuff in there to save space. People who need to get in there will know how, the rest shouldn't see it.

Overtones, I tried that way, per the about.com article, but it choked when I tried to move the Keychains folder. It refused the overwrite, giving me a dialog box that said something about login.keychain being in use. Sorry for the vagueness, but I deleted some things from with Keychain Access under Lion, and the move was then allowed. OK so far, but the next time I booted the Lion volume, it kept refusing my login. I presume that was part of what I deleted, although the login password was the same from the new install of Lion, vs. the old Snow Leopard installation.

Basically, I'm starting over, with a fresh install of Lion on the clean external drive. I haven't opened Mail on the old drive yet, so I'm confident that won't be an issue, so, when the new Lion install is done, I'm just going to move the Mail folder and the com.apple.mail.plist file.

Anybody, what's the step that will make the Keychains folder move happen smoothly? What effect will 1Password's presence on the old system have for the process?

Elaine

Hi,

This option didn't seem to work for me. My mail app tries to redownload every mail again.!