Transferring mail from laptop to desktop

This must be a POP type account and if so, do you plan on doing this on a regular basis or is this a one time thing?

If you have a POP account, you can change your settings so that Mail will not delete the messages off your email server.

Go to the Mail preferences, and choose the advanced tab. You can either disable the function by un-cheking the box that says "remove message from server after retreiving a message", or you can set it to delete the message off the server after a day, a week, or a month.

This way when you get back to your desktop, you can hit "get mail" and retrieve all your messages you had earlier retrieved on you laptop.

15" PowerBook G4 1.67GHz DL SuperDrive 2GB RAM Mac OS X (10.4.8) (AirPort Extreme & Express)

I regularly synchronise my POP mail between a PowerMac and PowerBook as I want copies of mail I've sent as well as received. i.e. I aim for both machines to be identical. I've struggled to achieve this but I think I'm there. This is what I do :

I have long ago manually set up accounts, signatures & rules on both machines but I think that now, MySync is designed to do this. (MySync will NOT transfer the emails, just the account settings).

I then use ChronoSync to synchronise ~/Library/Mail. If you do this alone, it seems to work but you need to rebuild every mailbox after synchronising. I therefore also sync ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist which again seems to work. (Note that Chronosync will not sync an individual file, just folders, so you have to arrange for it to sync the whole Preferences folder but leave out all the files except the one you want!)

Both programs are available on Version Tracker - http://www.versiontracker.com/macosx/index.shtml

Hope that helps.

Mail stores most preferences and all account settings in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist. Everything else, including all your messages and mailboxes, is stored in ~/Library/Mail. Copying these (the preferences file and the entire Mail folder itself, not just its contents) from one computer to the other is all you need to do in order to have an exact copy of all your messages, mailboxes and Mail settings on both computers.

In order to avoid potential permission issues, copy the files operating on the destination computer and while logged in as the user that's going to use those files. Also, be sure Mail isn't running on either computer while copying those files.

Alternatively, if what you really want to do is merge the mail stored on one computer with whatever mail is already stored on the other, then File > Import Mailboxes should be used instead.

DON'T try to synchronize mail between computers with a file synchronization utility. Mail keeps a reference to every message within the ~/Library/Mail/ folder in a global Envelope Index file. If this file is modified in more than one computer between synchronizations, there is no way a file synchronization utility can handle the situation properly.

Another, more subtle, and potentially more dangerous issue, is that Mail may use different *.emlx sequence numbers to name the same message in different computers or, worse yet, the same sequence number to name different messages in different computers. Again, the only thing a file synchronization utility can do about it is either overwrite files with the same name (thus potentially losing data) or not synchronize them at all.

Mail data "synchronization" at the filesystem level can only be done reliably if it's a one-way operation, i.e. if the entire contents of the Mail folder in one of the computers are overwritten by the entire contents of the other.

This is not a Mail thing. You would encounter similar issues with any other mail client because there is no way you can avoid the same files being modified on both computers if you use both between synchronizations. The only reliable way to achieve mail synchronization between computers is using an IMAP account and storing mail on the server -- that's precisely what IMAP is for.

Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user's home folder, i.e. ~/Library is the Library folder within the user's home folder.

You're welcome.

how do I get ONLY the emails received on my laptop while I was away to my
desktop machine (short of simply forwarding them to myself)?

I took that possibility into account in the following part of my post:

Alternatively, if what you really want to do is merge the mail stored on one computer with whatever mail is already stored on the other, then File > Import Mailboxes should be used instead.

You can, for example, create a custom "On My Mac" mailbox on the laptop, move all the messages to be transferred there, then import it from the desktop computer doing File > Import Mailboxes, choosing Mail for Mac OS X as the data format, and following the instructions.

Sorry for the delay. My Internet connection went down because of a storm.

I didn't provide specific instructions because there are a number of ways to do it.

You can export selected messages in standard mbox format doing File > Save As, choosing Raw Message Source as the data format, then import the resulting file as Other.

Or you can drag a mailbox in Mail to the Desktop, then import the resulting *.mbox folder (which is not the same as a standard mbox file) as Mail for Mac OS X.

Or you can just select either ~/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/ or ~/Library/Mail/POP-username@mailserver/ when importing, depending on where the mailboxes to be imported are located.

You can connect the two computers however you wish, as long as you have read access permissions to the files to be imported, or you can just copy the mailbox to be imported to an external drive.

Do what is more convenient for you. The import process itself is safe. As long as you don't overwrite files in the Finder while moving them between computers, there is no risk of losing data, so just try it and see how it works.

Note also that Mail always asks for the folder that contains the "things" to be imported, so that you can import more than one in a single step. If Mail for Mac OS X is chosen as the data format in File > Import Mailboxes, the "things" to be imported are the *.mbox folders, hence you must select the folder that contains them ( not the *.mbox folders themselves), then choose the specific mailboxes that are to be imported.

Not sure what you mean. The procedure to transfer sent messages would be the same. The only difference is that they're stored in another mailbox.