Moving "previous recipients" from Snow Leopard to Yosemite

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Peter Booth1 Author

Level 1

140 points

Moving "previous recipients" from Snow Leopard to Yosemite

Hi all,

My Macbook Pro died. RAM came loose and so it couldn't boot.

It was time for a new laptop anyway so I bought a new one.

My old machine ran Snow Leopard (10.6.8) and was backed up with Time Machine.

My new machine has Yosemite (10.10.2)

I chose not to use Time Machine to restore everything from my old machine to my new machine. I had a lot of junk on the old machine that I didn't want anymore, so I've been reinstalling things individually and grabbing individual files from the Time Machine backup folders.

I'm trying to figure out how to get all my Previous Recipients imported into Mac Mail.

I found a few posts on the internet but their pretty old and they reference Address Book and Yosemite uses Contacts so I'm not sure how to proceed.

Any help would be appreciated.

Also, both my email accounts are gmail-based so if there's some way to get the addresses from gmail online, I could do that too.

Thanks in advance.

P

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

Posted on Feb 15, 2015 6:51 AM

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Answer 1

Chris R.

Level 1

58 points

Feb 24, 2015 12:33 PM in response to Peter Booth1

Hello... Curious if you ever figured this out?

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Answer 2

Peter Booth1 Author

Level 1

140 points

Feb 24, 2015 12:46 PM in response to Chris R.

Nope. Never got any responses.

Both my email accounts are gmail, so I've been going into gmail via my web browser and using that "grab" email addresses as I've needed them.

Annoying...

P

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Answer 3

Chris R.

Level 1

58 points

Feb 24, 2015 1:42 PM in response to Peter Booth1

I think I may have figured it out.

It looks like in Yosemite, the recents now lives here:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.corerecents.recentsd/Data/Library/Recents/Recents

The Recents file is an sqlite3 file which you can browse (and export to CSV) with sqlitebrowser.

Previously, and I'm not sure when they made the switch (maybe Lion?; around Oct 2013 is the last my file was edited) it used to live here:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/SyncedPreferences/com.apple.mai l-com.apple.mail.recents.plist

I'm not sure of an easy way to import from the plist file, but you could always skim the file in a text editor and grab what you need. Not elegant, but it would work. If I figure something else out, I'll let you know.

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