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

In response to:

DougKW

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

Nov 23, 2011 6:40 PM (in response to David Carroll2)

Special thanks to DougKW for his solution! His instructions helped me upgrade from Lion to Snow Leopard (SL) by recovering thousands of valuable Inbox and Sent emails created and received in Lion.

When the drive on my MacBook Pro became corrupted and needed reformatting I decided to dump Lion and go back to SL. What a disaster that was; four days of fruitless effort trying to open in SL email backups created in Lion's TimeMachine. In two separate calls to AppleCare, my pleas for help returned the same answer: "Upgrade to Mountain Lion."

DougKW saved the day with his solution. He ought to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in BlackMagic for Mac.

Thanks, DougKW, whereever you are.

How to import emails from Lion into Snow Leopard

Based on instructions provided by DougKW on 11/23/2011

1. In Mail, click Mailbox > New Mailbox

2. In the New Mailbox dialog box, select "On My Mac" as the location of the new mailbox. Give the new mailbox any "MailboxName" you wish. Click OK.

3. In Finder, open Users, then follow this path:

Library > Mail > Mailboxes > "MailboxName.mbox"

At the end of the path you should find MailboxName.mbox, which represents the new mailbox you created and named in Step 2.

In the MailboxName.mbox folder you should only see an Info.plist file.

4. In the MailboxName.mbox, add a folder called "Messages".

5. Go to the location, such as a TimeMachine backup, where you have backed up your emails from Lion.

Note: Lion organizes your emails in multiple Messages folders, buried under cascading layers of folders.

6. In your email backup, drill down through the levels of folders to the Messages folder. You are looking for .emlx files, which is Lion's file format for your email messages.

Note: Snow Leopard does not recognize Lion's .emix file format.

7. Select and copy these .emlx files (Command-A then Command-C), then paste them (Command-V) into the new Messages folder you created at the end of the Library > Mail > Mailboxes > MailboxName.mbox > Messages path.

8. Go back to Mail. Open the new MailboxName folder under "ON MY MAC." At this point, the MailboxName folder is empty.

9. Click on Mail's File menu, then click on: Import Mailboxes

10. In the window that popped open, select Apple Mail (the default setting), then click Continue.

11. Browse to the end of this path:

Library > Mail > Mailboxes > MailboxName.mbox

12. Select MailboxName.mbox, then click Choose, then click Done.

Note: Snow Leopard Mail should begin importing your emails created in Lion. During the importing process Mail creates an "Import" folder that appears on the sidebar in Mail under "ON MY MAC."

13. In Mail under "ON MY MAC" on the sidebar, expand the Import folder. You should find a folder with the MailboxName you created and selected. In that folder you should see your emails successfully imported from Lion into Snow Leopard.

14. Select these emails, then paste them into the appropriate Inbox, Sent, or other mailbox.

Note: Apply this procedure to your Inbox, Sent, and other mailboxes. The process also successfully imports attachments. Finally, the instructions apply to mailboxes set up as IMAP and POP email accounts.

Suggestion: When you've finished restoring your emails, it may be a good idea to backup your imported emails. Under Mailbox, select Archive Mailbox… to get started.

for anyone who has used this approach, what level of finder hierarchy can you move the messages at in the step where you go to get the .emlx messages. i have a lot of messages from lion (500,000 or so) and I'm trying to sync them back on my snow leopard machine (which i keep going because apple abandoned support for running various powerpc apps i need).

so for reasons known only to apple, .mbox that i exported has a folder with a long serial number style title, inside that is a folder names Data and in side that are 10 folders numbered 0 to 9 an inside those are folders numbered 0 to 9 and inside those are some numbered folders and a some folders that have a "Messages" folder.

It appears that each messages folders can hold 1000 messages and after that another one is created. if i need to put just the emlx messages into the new "Messages" folder on my snow leopard machine, this would literally take me forever. Can I just drag either the serial number folder or the "Data" folder up in the hierarchy that has them all?

for clarity this is the current path to my imported messages:

documents>storedemails>POPaccount>INBOX.mbox>95D985A9-DE02-4704-96E7-5B1200623F6 8>Data>0 [or any numbers through 9]>0 [or any number through 9]>1>Messages

thanks for responses from other archaic beings who think backwards compatibility matters.