Apple Mail Manual Migration 10.6 to 10.8

You should just copy the whole Mail folder over. Mail will migrate it to the new format when you first launch it, as it changes the format of its database.

You may wish to copy the entire ~/Library/Mail Downloads folder as well.

Frankly, I think it's easiest to just upgrade in place (or use Migration Assistant), but if you want to do it the hard way for little benefit, I won't try to stop you ;-)

Does your V2 file exist on Snow Leopard? I thought that was Lion and above only.

You basically want the entire contents of ~/Library/Mail.

Hopefully you haven't already launched Mail on Mountain Lion and then tried to copy over the mail info... that could be messy.

I have exactly the same problem. Have you been able to get a solution? Do you now know what to copy and where exactly to paste them?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dear Chukk707,

Thanks a lot for your precious help.

Cheers.

This thread explains how to import all the mailboxes (scroll to the bottom two posts—it works!):

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1422832

Basically delete the V2 folder and put Mail and Mail downloads in User/Library

but I still can't get my zillion imap accounts imported.

Anyone know how to migrate the imap accounts so I can get new mail without having to add each individually?

I'm in the process of upgrading from an early 2008 iMac with Snow Leopard 10.6.8 to a Mid 2011 iMac with Mountain Lion 10.8.3 and had a similar query but things seem to have gone smothly for me with a manual mail transfer / migration.

I have 3 email accounts but quite a lot of messages along with folders, rules, etc to filter them all. At the very least, I just wanted to get all the messages across in tact and preferably in the correct folders. I was willing to set up the rest manually.

I have actually managed to transfer all messages, folders (with structure), rules and mail accounts with all server details. All I had to do was provide the 3 passwords. The ML installation was clean from scratch (bought it 2nd hand) and I did not open Mail at all. I don't know for sure whether this is very important but I worked on the basis that it might be.

I managed this by first rebuilding every mailbox and folder on the SL iMac. I then quit Mail and in Finder, I navigated to the Library where I copied the 'Mail' and 'Mail Downloads' folders to a USB stick. I also went to the preferences folder (still in Library) and copied the com.apple.mail.plist file but also came across another apple mail plist file with a lot of numbers and letters so I copied that to the USB stick too. So I have two folders and two plist files.

On the ML iMac, I navigate to Library (with a Finder windo open, click on the Go menu, hold left option key and it will appear in the menu). For safety's sake, I made a copy of the existing Mail folder which contained a V2 folder and some stuff under that. I then deleted it from the Library and copied the two folders on my USB stick. There were no mail plist files in the preferences folder (presumably because I hadn't run Mail at all yet), so I dropped in the two plist files from my SL machine.

That was it, so I ran Mail which came up with a first time use screen, then there was a splash screen informing me that it was updating / upgrading my migrated mailboxes, etc and that this may take a few minutes. I didn't time it but it didn't take very long and then it asked for passwords for each of my email accounts. After that, Mail opened a proper displaing all mailboxes, smart mailboxes, folders, accounts, etc. Rules appear to be in tact. Looking at the library now and the folder structure has completely changed with a V2 folder and so on.

This is exactly what I was hoping to achieve and I didn't think it would work but for those moving from SL to ML, it can be done. If it hadn't worked, my next move was to upgrade the SL iMac to ML and then try to migrate that way.

Hope it helps someone.

I just discovered that i'm having the same problem migrating from Snow Leopard on my mini to Mountain Lion on my newly acquired 27" iMac. I will post the results of my efforts after i'm successful.