Export Mailbox Never Finishes on Larger Mailboxes

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MTUser2007 Author

Level 1

41 points

Export Mailbox Never Finishes on Larger Mailboxes

I am in the process of changing a few email accounts from IMAP to POP by exporting the mailbox, deleting the account and setting up a new account in Mail as POP. The process works fine with a mailbox that has say 20 email messages, but for ones that have hundreds or even thousands of messages, the export never concludes. I've waited 8 hours and all I can see is the INBOX.partial.mbox that has info.plist, mbox, and table_of_contents that are all zero byte files. What am I doing wrong?

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3), MC725LL/A 2.2Ghz

Posted on Dec 31, 2012 9:16 AM

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Answer 1

Tim98250

Level 1

5 points

Jan 26, 2013 12:36 PM in response to MTUser2007

Don't know if this is the answer or not, but - I had similar trouble in pre-Mountain Lion mail and gave up. Now today with Mountain Lion, I thought I'd try again, and this time I turned off the Check for new mail automatically thing - set it to manual. And then it exported just fine. I watched the file name of the exported mail box until the word "partial" was not included in the filename.

The whole thing took less than 5 minutes for a 12,000 message inbox. About a 2 GB file after export.

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Answer 2

MTUser2007 Author

Level 1

41 points

Jan 7, 2013 8:39 AM in response to MTUser2007

I could never get this to work so I gave up and deleted the mailbox and started over. My theory was that by moving the associated domain/site from shared hosting to my VPS, the mailbox lost contact with associated IMAP account. I am going to try reordering steps next time.

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Answer 3

Csound1

Level 9

60,063 points

Jan 7, 2013 8:47 AM in response to MTUser2007

Wait until the export completes, or fails, post the failure message if that happens.

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Answer 4

MTUser2007 Author

Level 1

41 points

Jan 26, 2013 12:39 PM in response to Tim98250

Thanks. Good idea. I'll give it a try if have this problem again. I had only a few thousand messages and it wasn't done after 3 hours. This is a 2.2Ghz i7 machine so I new something was wrong.

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