Can I move Mail (Lion) files back to Mail (Snow Leopard)?

I have some 50 mailboxes 😕

Hi everyone,

For I had the same problem (multi mailboxes archived for ages…), I found a great software which solve everything for me.

Here it is : http://www.weirdkid.com/products/emailchemy/

It's a swift army knife that convert many mailboxes format.

It is a commercial software but you can give it a try with some limitation.

Hope that'll help.

Best wishes.

There is a third party App that backups Apple Mail to PDF format. So that you do not have to reload in OS Mail. I think it also keeps the Mailbox structure.

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I used to save all my emails as text as has been suggested, but this became too cumbersome. I have since gone with Mailsteward. Mailsteward autmatically imports all you email from mail.app and stores them in a database including all attachments. I schedule this to automatically back up every 2 hours. It then allows you to use extensive searches on the database. The programme runs great with 10's of thousands of emails. It means all my email is there, I never delete, I allow Mailsteward to back up everything and just delete it from my mail app. This really has saved me time and effort. It also means that if you are on Lion you import all your email and then copy the database to Snow Leopard and have access to all your email.

Many thanks DougKW. Your procedure worked perfectly!

I'd like to suggest my answer to a similar by worse problem with loosing eMails on both OS 10.6, and 10.7 both backups were curupted so I couldn't rebuild any of the Mail data. I ended up with only the last month's eMail on my POP3 accounts and more on my IMAPs.

I found that when I got the scatering of eMails on my OS 10.6 that I could use the Spotlight in the top right corner of the screen. When I got too many hits on all the "mbox" folders, I'd add more terms to reduce the number of folders to surf. Hopefully I can live without using this method too many times.

I've decided that they don't make external disks like they used to and need one on each computer. I have both computers' Mail setup to download all accounts to both computers, so I have double backups, now.

Maybe I should burn DVDs for offsite catastrophy backups!? Would this make is less likely that my house would burn down?

I have the same problem as others. I was able to move all my apple Mail from a SnowLeopard iMac to a new MacbookPro, and everything was fine. I went on travel and added a lot of mail to the Macbook, from various accounts of imap and pop types. Now I want to bring all this file structure back into SL on my iMac, which is my usual daily computer. I tried to follow the instructions above, but I cannot find any .emlx files in my Lion Mail, only .mbox files.

I copied all my ~/Library/Mail stuff from Lion Macbook to an external drive, along with the file ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mai.plist.

The mailboxes are stored in ~/Libary/Mail/V2.

Then I copied this stuff to my SL imac. That is, I overwrote what was there in the ~/Library/Mail folder. This resulted, on the SL imac, of Apple Mail not seeing any mailboxes at all, other than Inbox. So then on my SL imac I used the Mail menu item "import" to have Mail import mailboxes from the external drive. That brought in the file structure, in a folder named Import, but the mailboxes had no mail.

Furthermore, even in the Inbox, I can see a list of messages, but when I try to open them the windows are blank.

I do not want to upgrade the SL imac to Lion; I had a very large number of incompatibility problems with my new Macbook.I just want to get my mail back to my SL imac.

Any suggestions?

You cannot move mailboxes from Lion back to SL as the Lion has a newer file structure. The solution is to convert them into a generic mailbox format, Emailchemy may do that job.

Otherwise, my humble piece of advice is to upgrade to Lion. What compatibility issues to you have, give some examples.

Oh dear, this is not good.

I have been using Macs for many years, and so I have accumulated a lot of files and lots of programs (apps). I learned that some of these cause trouble with Lion. I have not yet got the problems all solved on my MacbookPro, although I have been gradually eliminating some of the problems. For example, the anti-virus program Sophos, in the version 7.3.12c, causes dreadful problems and has to be uninstalled. My Microsoft Office is too old to run with Lion, and will have to be updated (repurchased or some substitute used, such as LibreOffice). There were lots of permission problems, no doubt created when I was trying to get things like Keynote to run properly (eventually, after corrupting all the iWork programs, I found Sophos to be the problem). I will have to buy an upgrade for Kaleidagraph. It will just take time and money (I have already bought Lion, but other things will have to be bought). And before embarking on yet another lengthy conversion (It took more than a week to be running on the new top of the line MacbookPro, because I had used Migration), I had hoped to be able to do my email again on my nice iMac. I have 10GB of Mail files, all stored ujder On My Mac (no longer on any server) and I had expected to just update my SL iMac from my Lion Macbook, and indeed, to use the Macbook whenever I travel and then update the base iMac.

I have looked at your suggested Emailchemy and it appears that I might be able to convert the Lion files, which I gather use .eml format, to .mbox format, which seems to be what SL uses. So I first copy 10Gb if Mail from the Lion MacbookPro to the SL iMac, convert this to .mbox, and then to go back to the MacbookPro later do I convert back again? I am confused about how I will function with these two systems and Mail. Maybe I should return to using Eudora, do you think?

Antivirus program Sophos is something you do not need, if you really wish a virus program to remove Windows viruses, use ClamXav, it is more than sufficient.

Indeed, Word 2004 must be upgraded, but you must to that sooner or later or use alternative office apps.

The main argument for upgrading to Lion, if you have a mac newer than 2007–2008, is that it works better with Lion than with older OSs, and, if very new, it is really a problem to downgrade.

I tested Emailchemy only once in shareware mode, some time ago, and it worked. It was from mere curiosity. Otherwise, this behavior is logical and applied to many apps: a newer app may create files, which may be incompatible with older versions. The same is valid for iPhoto and iTunes libraries.

[rev], you're quite right. Mailsteward is an exceptional program. The full version is available free (working on up to 15,000 e-mails). The database it produces for archive is superior for searching and it reportedly can be sent the other direction back into almost any e-mailer. Remember when Apple prided itself on the ability to open anything? Portable mboxing with folder structure intact was left out by choice.

I have since modified my workflow a little due to the purchase of an iPad. I copied all my email from mailsteward into my google apps account so that all of it is accessible from my ipad. This worked well. However, I still have mailsteward backing up from my mail.app every two hours.

The only downside to mailsteward is that is only supports mail.app. I have since moved to mailmate which in my opinion is the most comprehensive and best imap mail client available. I now have mail.app loading at login in the background so mailsteward still backs up, but all my email work is done in mailmate.

Looking through the the above posts, I would recommend folks move to IMAP. If you used imap on your Lion installation you could simply revert to Snow Leopard log into your email and everything would be there. This is better in terms of security (should you lose or someone steals your mac) and means all your email is accessible across all your mobile devices and an email read on one device is automatically marked read in another.

I invested in mailsteward because email is important to me. It dawned on me that the majority of my work during the day is in my email client. Email clients are not renowned for handling lots of email well. With disk space being cheaper than ever storing it is not an issue. In the end I found that mailstewards ability to copy all the email in my email client including attachments and mailstewards extensive search facilities made managing my email a breeze. I have some 10,000 emails which take up just over 5GB of space in the database. Loading and searching the database has been easy and I'm using a 2007 MacBook Pro. I use superduper! and Time Machine to back up so everything is secure.

Use emailalchemy

The simpliest way i found to do that is to export mailboxes from lion then to import them into snow leopard.

1- select all the mailboxes in the mail app on lion

2- right click and choose export the mailboxes

3- choose a folder (on an external drive is better)

4- copy the exported mailboxes on your SL mac or plug your external drive

5- from mail app on SL, import those files (choose import data from Apple mail)

it worked great for me. I recovered the mailboxes, + all the mails inside of course. It even recovered the read/unread status

hope this helps