why do I have multiple archives in mailbox

Same problem. Here's what it looks like.

I did a manual transfer of the mail files from my Lion Partition to my Mountain Lion Partition.

To do so I placed

• folder Mail in User / Library /
• file com.apple.mail.plist in User / Library / Preferences

before starting up Mail.

On startup of Mail I got the Mail Upgrade Dialogue :

After my existing Mail messages were upgraded through a series of progress bars I had the multiple "On My Macs" in the new "Archive" box.

The bottom Archive Box is the controlled one. Click on any of the expand triangles and it (alone) expands in the sidebar.

Also:

Expand the "On My Mac" mailbox,

Collapse the "Archive" box,

Expand the "Archive" box

... and all "On My Macs" mailboxes are expanded.

I found a way of fixing it manually.

In the Mountain Lion Mail I right-clicked on the bottom On My Mac Archive box and selected Export Mailbox...

The export took about 5-10 minutes (I've files back to 2002).

I was able to monitor the progress of the export with Window > Activity.

After exporting, I deleted the bottom On My Mac Archive box. This deleted it and it's duplicates.

Deleting also took about 5-10 minutes and was monitored with Window > Activity.

I then went to File > Import Mailboxes... and selected the saved export.

Importing also took about 5-10 minutes and was monitored with Window > Activity.

After the import things were back in order and look like this:

Just wanted to note that this didn't work for me -- I went through the whole procedure & things seemed OK, but then when I got some new mail, the three "on my mac" archives reappeared.

I assume that this is because I had rules that populated some folders in the archives.

I have the same issue since updating to Mountain Lion. When archiving in Mail, it creates multiple On My Mac folders. If I try to delete one of them, it deletes them all (this caused me to lose all of my archived mail that I had just placed in Archive. Frustrating!). Definately a glitch that should be remedied in an update.

i have just tried moving all the contents of my archive folder into another folder, and then deleting the duplicated archive folders. however, when i reopen mac mail and try to archive something, it creates the 3 duplicate folders all over again. seems there is no solution or workaround to this at the moment...

I posted this reply on another thread where a user was having the same problem. I'll post it here too:

I'm having the same problem. It appears that having a mailbox named "Archive" creates multiple "On My Mac" subfolders for each email address that I have, but they're actually the same folder appearing multiple times. If I delete one of the subfolders, they all disappear.

Fortunately, I had a Time Machine backup and was able to recover my old messages after deleting them. But as soon as as I renamed my old messages mailbox to "Archive", the exact same thing happened again! This seems to be a bug that Apple needs to address with the current version of Mountain Lion/Mail. It doesn't seem to like having mailboxes named "Archive".

I found a temporary fix until Apple addresses this bug.

1) Since you can't seem to rename or delete the "Archive" mailbox with subfolders in it, create a "New Mailbox" from the Mailbox menu

2) Name it "Old Mail" or something similar. Do not name it "Archive" or you will have the same problem again

3) Select all your messages from one of the "On My Mac" subfolders in your "Archive" malbox and drag it to the new "Old Mail" subfolder

4) Delete the "On My Mac Folder" in the "Archive" mailbox and they should all disappear. The "Archive" mailbox should disappear shortly after that

5) Again, do not rename it "Archive" or you will have the same problem again

Yeah i thought of doing the same thing. The only problem is, now whenever you right-click on a mail item and choose Archive, it auto creates the On My Mac Archive folder again, but in duplicate 😟

Apple please fix this in 10.8.1. Its rather annoying!

same problem here. is there a permanent fix yet?