mail recovery in snow leopard from mountain lion

Question

Level 1

6 points

mail recovery in snow leopard from mountain lion

hi,

i've just reinstalled my old snow leopard onto my mabook pro (2010).

but unfortunately my mail exports didn't include all my mails.

so now i would like to transfer my mails from my mountain lion backup (which i have on a external hdd) onto my snow leopard mail.

is that possible? i would like to skip the steps that i backup my snow leopard, recover my mountain lion from backup, copy the mails and reload my current snow leopard. i tried the migration service and directly copying the mail files ( the folder and the .plist file from the preferences, which had a unusual suffix attached to it so eventually it didn't work) but none of those steps worked out, maybe i did something wrong?

any suggestions? would really appreciate it!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8), Mountain Lion Apple Mail recovery

Posted on Aug 17, 2012 2:57 AM

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Answer 1

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Aug 17, 2012 3:30 AM in response to Abularfia

There's no easy way, due to the changes to Mail's mailboxes in Mail 6. I'm told that you actually have to dig though the raw mailbox folders and drag message files back into Mail individually.

Out of curiosity, why did you downgrade? If you had a lot of emails, and if you were having problems that are not normal, you would have been better of to try troubleshooting them first, and it may still be easier to reinstall ML than deal with those emails.

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Answer 2

Abularfia Author

Level 1

6 points

Aug 17, 2012 3:45 AM in response to thomas_r.

I downgraded because my mac was running slow and i had the famous "wifi-issue" and after reading through a dozen of threads no proper soultion could be found so i downgraded back to snow leopard as it is running very stable on my macbook. lion and mountain lion are set for the newer macs so i'll just stick with the version that my mac was already shipped with. when i'll buy a new one i'll just stay with the version that it came with (lion or mountain lion) and will not upgrade when a new software version will come out, because it doesn't run smoothly. and i just had to many bad experiences after upgrading the system.

i don't want to copy the whole new mail settings i just want my old emails that unfortunately weren't included in the export i made on the mountain lion mail programm. what i read is that you can acces the folder were the mails are located over the time machine finder. do you know how to do that? so i could just copy all the mail files from the time machine finder to my snow leopard mail folder.

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Answer 3

thomas_r.

Level 7

31,989 points

Aug 17, 2012 3:55 AM in response to Abularfia

I'm sure that there would have been some Inge you could have done to solve those problems, as those are not normal issues, despite what you may read in troubleshooting forums like this one. But, that's all water under the bridge at this point.

I have never actually had to deal with a Mail downgrade in a case like this, but what you will need to do is restore individual message files. The Mail folder is found in the Library folder in your user folder. That Library folder is invisible in Lion and ML, so you will need to hold down the option key while selecting Library from the Go menu in the Finder. You will probably need to create any missing mailboxes in Mail, then dump the raw message files into them in the Finder, then rebuild those mailboxes in Mail (see the Mailbox menu).

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Answer 4

Abularfia Author

Level 1

6 points

Aug 17, 2012 5:07 AM in response to thomas_r.

ok i did it a bit diffrent but now i have my emails as files with the suffix ".emlx".

How do i add these now to my Mail, because neither Drag and Drop nor importing the Inbox Folders worked.

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Answer 5

Abularfia Author

Level 1

6 points

Aug 17, 2012 7:46 AM in response to Abularfia

Ok, i figured it out now. Here the solution:

-close mail

-allow finder to show hidden files -> google if you don't know how to do that.

-open up your time machine hdd and select the latest( or the one you want to recover) date folder. with your privat folder in it

-navigate to users/(your name)/library/mail and copy that folder onto your hard drive.

-open up your current user library folder and navigate to the same "mail" folder.

-from the importet folder "Mail", select the inboxes(they have your emailadress on it) you want to import. Navigate in that .mbox file to the subfolder "Messages", here you can see all your messages with the suffix .emlx, leave that finder window open

-on your current mail folder there is a subfolder called "Mailboxes" create a .mbox file there (just add a new folder and rename it to (name it as you want).mbox)

-create a subfolder in that just created .mbox file named "Messages" now copy all messages you want to import into that folder from your already opened imported mail folder.

after your done moving the files open your mail programm and click "import inbox" now just choose your created .mbox file, in which you copied all your mails and hit import. the mails will now be imported to Apple Mail.

and your done.

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Answer 6

Sep 27, 2013 5:54 AM in response to Abularfia

Hello i have the same Problem..

i would like to copy the mails from 10.8 to 10.6

i copied as described the .mbox with the mails (.emlx files)

Unfortunately, the apple mail 10.6 can not read the .emxl files an the mbox format of 10.8.??

do you know a solution?

Thank you!

Kind Regards

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Answer 7

Abularfia Author

Level 1

6 points

Sep 27, 2013 7:42 AM in response to macbook2013

hey,

i hope i still remember how i did it.

but as far as i know you have to create that .mbox file on your current snow leopard setup and than in that .mbox file a subfolder named "Messages" into which you copy all your mails from the imported "Messages" folder in the .mbox you copied over from your time maschine backup. once you copied them over Mail should be able to recognize and read the mails when you launch the program.

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