Importing old Apple.Mail data

Due to various and persisting problems, I had to reinstall 10.8.2.

Before this step, I created an image of the old system volume on another external disc.

The clean install worked just fine.

No I try to import old messages / folders from the old Apple.Mail. As last time, this step doesn't work as expected...

I get folders named A368644-7d6ds7s88 and so on. Not even a bit the old folder structure.

Could someone provide hints how to do this the right way?

Posted on Mar 9, 2013 2:45 PM

May 28, 2013 1:53 PM in response to Ernie Stamper

Ernie Stamper, thanks for the tip. I had the same directory structure problem as seaside. (Described here: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1524054) Using the following procedure, I finally got my old archive mailboxes transferred from one machine to another.

Boot machine from Lion installer on a USB stick
Open Terminal
Mount image of old machine with 'hdiutil attach'
Copy with 'cp -rp' mailboxes from /Volumes/<old machine>/Users/<old user>/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes to my new install /Volumes/<new machine>/Users/<new user>/Library/Mail/V2/Mailboxes
Reboot machine to usual boot volume
Delete /Volumes/<new machine>/Users/<new user>/Library/Mail/V2/MailData/Envelope*
Start Mail

After a few hours of indexing messages the archive mailboxes appeared as normal.

Re-indexing instructions: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH4801?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US