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Mail upgrade failed: osx lion

I have a Macbook pro 17 intel dual core.


I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion and I have encountered the following problem.


Mail begins the importing of messages and once the import is complete it moves to the migrating data step


"MAIL UPGRADE FAILED"

An error occured during the upgrade. Click continue to launch the Mail Import Assistant, which will help you create a new library and import your existing messages"


When I click "Continue", the following message appears


Your Mail index has been damaged. To repair it, quit Mail.


Mail will repair the index the next time you open Mail. Your mailboxes and messages will be preserved.


But of course, Mail doesn't repair itself the next time it is opened....this just continues to happen.



Any help? I have read threads that suggesting deleting Mail preferences can help. Interestingly, I can't find mail preferences in the library folder

Posted on Sep 28, 2011 6:20 PM

Reply
7 replies

Dec 1, 2011 8:02 PM in response to shenyard

I fixed my issue, though it took hours of trial and error.


First, check Console (Applications/Utilities/Console) and click on All Messages in the left sidebar. I had a message about permission denied to copy a file during the upgrade. I manually moved that file to the desktop. After that the message migration finished, and Mail launched. Hurray I thought! But on reboot, Mail would not launch. It just hung. This time there weren't any helpful messages in Console to be found.


I read over these threads for the tips:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3189986?start=0&tstart=0

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191534


As best I can remember (it's been a long night), this was my process:


(Force) Quit Mail

Navigate to userI/Library/Mail folder

Move the entire Mail folder elsewhere, like your desktop

Launch Mail. At this point it should be be prompting you for info.


If you don't have anything on your machine only, just put in your info and download everything from your server from scratch. You're done! If however you have my problem with 164,000 messages stored locally, read on…


Quit Mail

Back in user/Library there's a new Mail folder.

One by one, move the items from the old Mail folder to the new one and launch Mail. Make sure to move the user/library/mail/v2/maildata/accounts.plist first so it stops prompting you for account info. Make sure to quit Mail between every file move. If you don't see a v2 folder, or a v2-temp folder, it means the migration hasn't happened yet. Just keep moving things over until it does, cause the migration changes the directory structure of the Mail folder.


At the point you move your old archived messages over, the next Launch Apple will import and migrate all the messages. This can take anywhere from 2 minutes to 45 depending on how many messages it needs to cull through.


I ended up moving everything but the RSS folder items back, and Mail is once again stable.


At some point I also booted into Lion Recovery partition (hold Command + R at boot) and ran Disk Utility to repair permissions. However I don't believe that actually helped.


Good Luck!

Jun 9, 2012 7:20 AM in response to shenyard

Thanks to Shenyard for the helpful tips, which certainly saved me hours more of Mail misery.


Who knows what part of these instructions did the trick, but my Mail has been working perfectly since I executed them.


Migration Assistant had ported over 500 MB+ of Mail mailboxes, from a G5 running Leopard 10.5.8, and did not provide seamless transfer, although other applications and files came over just fine.


Probably, it was the recommended review of Console messages and lifting out one or more named files that seemed related to Mail, that made things work.


*** Additional insurance for anybody venturing into Preferences and Libraries folder: I always keep a folder on my desktop where I move questionable files or preferences, and I label folders progressively, so I can find items I have moved, in case I need to reinstate them or revert to a previous Mail state.


This post saved me a call to Apple, which I could have done earlier since my 27" iMac is brand new-- but I seem to like beating my head against an operating system until one of us bleeds, before I make that rescue call.

Jun 9, 2012 7:45 AM in response to buckwheatzydaco

If you find the Envelope Index file and delete it, this should force Mail to rebuild everything. It's found at this location:


/Users/UserName/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope Index


This has fixed a lot of problems my clients who have a large amount of stored email. As always, make sure you have a full back of everything before doing any major upgrades, especially before upgrading to Lion. With Mountain Lion on the way, this is especially important since we don't know yet what changes are coming with the new Mail app.

Mail upgrade failed: osx lion

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